Image recognition apps on the iphone

Sep 27, 2010

Mashable recently reported on an app that recognises wine! Not the wine itself of course (but no doubt it wont be long before you can dip your iphone into your glass and it will tell you what it is) but the wine labels!

Snooth is one of the webs largest wine rating and review sites and its app – Snooth Wine Pro allows wine enthusiasts to scan wine labels and the app will then tell them more about the wine in question including things like checking which nearby stores have the wine in stock, comparing prices, posting reviews etc etc

Mashable’s article set me thinking about other iphone apps that I have used that allow image recognition thereby giving you information about the product.

The image recognition technology for the Snooth app is powered by TinEye, which uses specialized digital image fingerprinting to find image matches but as I explore below its not the only image recognition software for the iphone and not being much of a wine connoisseur I find these these apps much more interesting and I’m sure you will too.

I love these type of apps as they can often be indispensable for collectors of books or CD’s or movies so here’s Appertunity’s selection of three iphone image recognition and bar code scanning apps:

Snaptell

Snap a picture of the cover of any book, DVD, CD, or video game and within seconds get a rating, description and links to Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, IMDb, Barnes & Noble and more.

Use this app while shopping in a store to quickly find more information, compare prices, buy the product, or to remember to look at the product later.

http://www.snaptell.com/

Kooaba

Using kooaba on iPhone gives you instant product information. Take a picture of a DVD cover for example, and receive trailers and reviews.

Or shop for the cheapest prices directly on your phone. This works also for CD covers, game covers and movie posters in the US and Europe. More objects and countries are coming soon.

http://www.kooaba.com/

Lookthatup

Simply snap a photo to get more information. Use the lookthatup iPhone app, email or site upload to instantly get more information about a given item. With a lookthatup account, you can even add  your own images to the lookthatup database to make them searchable to other lookthatuppers. Lookthatup lets you search for more information about an object simply by taking a photo with your phone.

Look up paintings, movie posters, DVDs, games etc and instantly share with your friends on facebook and twitter.

http://www.lookthatup.com/home