Computer Vision News - January 2017

28 Computer Vision News Application Application boomApp truly gives consumers the ability to interact with what they see. While other technology may have the ability to recognize images, boomApp has the unique value of video recognition. Consumers can scan and get information about any video, from TV shows and movies to YouTube and live TV. The app gets the information from anything available online or included in their database. And when we will all start to use Augmented Reality glasses (like Microsoft HoloLens ) we will be able to just look at a certain thing in order to get information right away. The main challenge in developing the app was scalability. The app needs to process a lot of data in order to recognize so many different videos and images with fast results. It is a difficult problem to solve with all of these features combined. With an extremely fast database, boomApp provides excellent results providing a match to a scanned image or video in less than 5 seconds. When they first started to develop the app, they tried a monolithic approach of the system: that is a system running in one single machine and/or using one single database. However, they found that with that approach, the system was not scalable to a level of millions of items. Only when they separated that database into several small services, were they able to fully scale the system and give it the possibility to continue to add more videos while keeping the matching time and database search as constant as possible. They had a lot of success by accessing the OpenCV library which they found useful because it provides methods and base functions needed to build your own algorithms. After using it for 5 years, Nuno highly recommends OpenCV, with its huge community and great support. boomApp targets advertisers who want to get insights from their offline campaigns. It can give the analytics information so that they know if viewers are paying attention to billboard, magazine, and television ads. In this way, the app provides a bridge between offline communication and the digital. boomApp also targets TV broadcasters and has a partnership with Fox to make their shows more interactive in Portugal. João thinks that with boomApp, a clickable world becomes a better world because information will be accessible and much easier to find. You don’t have to type. All you need to do is point your smartphone to an image or video and “boom” you gain access to that information! You don’t have to type. All you need to do is point your smartphone to an image or video and “boom” you gain access to that information!