Your Web News in One Place

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

Sign up for GreenGeeks web hosting
October 31, 2013 04:51 pm GMT

Visual Search App CamFind Passes 1M Downloads, Makes Its API Public

CamFind screenshotCamFind, the visual search app that wants to be a faster and more accurate alternative to Google Goggles, recently hit two milestones. Its iOS app just crossed a total of one million downloads (an Android version will be released in two months) and its API is now available for other developers to download on Mashape. The app’s creators, Dominik Mazur and Bradford Folkens, say they made CamFind’s API available in response to requests from other developers who wanted a image recognition back-end for their apps. Many developers want to use CamFind’s search technology for shopping comparison services, but there are many other possible use cases. For example, students have used CamFind on field trips to identify and learn about plants. The app reads search results out loud, so travelers take a picture of an item and learn what it is called in different languages. You can take a picture of a restaurant’s sign to pull up Yelp reviews and photos of its dishes. Mazur and Folkens are also excited about developers using CamFind’s API to create apps for wearable tech like Google Glass. The duo’s startup, Image Searcher, Inc., currently has two apps available for download: CamFind and TapTapSee, which is made for visually-impaired people. CamFind and TapTapSee have processed 6 million search requests and 2.5 million search requests, respectively. Image Searcher, Inc. was founded in 2011 after Mazur and Folkens, who met while studying computer science and mathematics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, decided to embark on their first venture capital funded startup (their first startup, which they ran for 10 years, was called Net Ideas). They decided to work on mobile visual search products in order to leverage their search experience and because they believed they could build a better alternative to Google Goggles. CamFind combines proprietary image recognition technology with a team of people in the Philippines who tag images with keywords to achieve what the founders claim is a 90% accuracy rate. Crowdsourcing image tags identifies the 80% of images that algorithms can’t recognize and is the key to CamFind’s success, says Mazur. “As more people take more pictures, the technology only gets better,” says Mazur. “State-of-the-art technology for computer visual searches alone is still only good at recognizing 20% of the objects you get. We can answer 95 out of 100 images taken, so we’re still very far ahead.” I tested CamFind and Google

Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/lDAQusxWjRY/

Share this article:    Share on Facebook
View Full Article

Techcrunch

TechCrunch is a leading technology blog, dedicated to obsessively profiling startups, reviewing new Internet products, and breaking tech news.

More About this Source Visit Techcrunch