Vufind Launches Mobile App with Object Recognition Engine for Video and Images - with Auto Tagging

Posted by Richard Kastelein in Breaking News on November 23, 2010  |  0 Comments More from this author  |    |  Follow Richard Kastelein on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Twitter | YouTube

Vufind, Inc., a mobile social gaming and networking company, today launched its first mobile app for the iPhone. The Vufind app recognizes people's interests based on their photos and videos, and then entertains and connects them with friends and businesses that share similar interests. Vufind's mobile apps and games turn the user's iPhone into a visual robot that can be used for immersive gaming experiences that blend the virtual world with the physical world through object recognition. The Vufind app is part augmented reality game based on object recognition, part visual social network and part recommendation engine based on recognizing the user's visual profile.

Vufind running on your Android phone or iPhone (launching very shortly) automatically tags your photos and videos on the fly as you upload them to cloud services such as facebook, twitter, flickr, etc so they are searchable and discoverable by friends and others who share your interests. You can also tag them yourself manually. Will they come to Connected TV with an App soon?

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Using Vufind's mobile app, photos and videos are automatically tagged with objects and scenes before they are uploaded to a cloud social media site of your choice such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. for easy discovery and sharing with friends. The app also allows users to visually checkin whatever scene or object has their interest at the place they are currently visiting. Visual checkin is a lot richer, more engaging and viral than text-checkin and automated tagging ensures it is discoverable.

"Vufind's object recognition engine is the key enabler to connecting people through imagery and algorithmically inferring their interests and 'visual profile' based on their photos and videos. The app will also make targeted recommendations to businesses and services based on user interests," stated Moataz Rashad, founder and CEO of Vufind. "Comparing your visual profile to a friend, or a friend of a friend, on Facebook can reveal insight into your social graph's shared interests as well as be highly entertaining. Furthermore, users earn points every time they get a photo tagged based on the objects in the photo. For instance, if you get the highest score for the cat object, you win the cat Vufinder Ambassador award, and Vufind will award you a relevant gift card from a cat-food business such as Purina or PetSmart etc, depending on the contest running that week. Consumers and advertisers find this very rewarding."

Vufind's unique core technology is a scalable object recognition engine that analyzes videos and images and identifies objects, scenes, faces, logos and infers concepts. The engine enables automated tagging of any image or video regardless of format or resolution and learns to detect the objects based on training samples, while utilizing user feedback to refine its precision. Users can actually participate in training the engine by uploading their own photos of their favorite objects that they wish the engine to recognize.

Thousands of photos and an increasing number of videos are being amassed by the average consumer today. Taking the time to manually tag and organize these files is daunting. VuAlbum on Facebook serves as an organizing utility for users' photo albums and enables users to create new albums based on a theme/topic, create collages etc.

Vufind is also running photo submission contests on the vuAlbum fanpage on Facebook for users to share the best photos of a particular object, and compete to win weekly gift cards.