Object Recognition Systems on Mobile Phones

While many web-based systems exist for content-based image search, applications of these systems to mobile devices are relatively rare. Some research is being conducted on building assistive technologies for the blind and visually impaired using mobile devices and object recognition. One such system is GroZi [7]. GroZi aims to help the visually impaired by recognizing and locating the items on a customer’s shopping list among the items on the shelf.
Another set of applications aim to build on-demand mobile tour or museum guides [8]. Some of these systems try to perform location recognition by using photos from the location as input. Yeh et al. [9] propose a system that first queries an image database by using a photo taken by a user. After a match is found, the system then searches the web based on keywords associated with the determined location. PhoneGuide [10] is another application that makes use of the mobile phone as a museum guide. The user can take pictures of the various exhibits in the museum using the digital camera on her/his mobile phone, and then query a database for information on the exhibit using the image as the input.
Seifert et al. [11] propose a system that utilizes object recognition and GPS on a mobile device for taking an inventory of traffic signs. The algorithm for sign recognition takes advantage of the fact that traffic signs have obvious shapes and patterns which are known in advance.
Jia et al. [12] propose a generic architecture called Photo-to-Search that can be used to query the web directly from mobile devices using images taken by the digital camera on the device and minimal textual input. The underlying object recognition system uses SIFT to detect key points and perform the matching. There are also systems for outdoor hobbyists, such as systems for flower or fish recognition [13,14].