NEC announced today the availability of new image recognition services for smartphones and mobile terminals in Japan beginning June 1. The new service can provide detailed information on a wide range of subjects, including everything from food to automobiles that appear in photos taken with mobile devices. In recent years, as smartphones have become increasingly popular, a new market has emerged for image recognition services for mobile terminal cameras. However, there are complicated challenges to producing fast and accurate systems in support of these services, including the creation of a processing engine, database renewal and maintenance.
NEC’s new service meets this demand by utilizing the company’s image recognition engine, featuring the world’s highest level of recognition accuracy, to compare subjects from photos to image data registered on the cloud or on mobile terminals. Once a subject is recognized, detailed information about that subject can be displayed on a mobile device.
This system provides high speed, highly accurate image recognition services by capitalizing on NEC’s internally developed image recognition technologies. Furthermore, original NEC technologies that compress image data and reduce the amount of calculations required for an application enable this system to effectively operate even on the limited computing resources of mobile terminals.
Systems such as image processing engines and database renewal, which are required in order to offer services, are provided on the cloud. This frees service providers from having to develop a series of different systems on their own and enables them to easily launch new services.
