UK-based Blippar has announced the launch of its new fine-grained reality landmark recognition API, which uses deep learning to recognise thousands of famous landmarks worldwide, including buildings, bridges, castles, places of worship and more. Blippar’s Landmark Recognition includes iconic landmarks, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal and the Statue of Liberty, as well as many regional ones, such as the Eureka Tower in Melbourne, Australia and the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, Canada.
It only uses computer vision and does not use location information from GPS. This gives the technology the ability to not only recognise a famous landmark that’s physically near a person, but also from a photo, on a magazine cover and the like, even if the landmark is geographically far.
Landmark Recognition is also available within the Blippar app, where recognition doesn’t need a static image, but happens dynamically as users scan the environment around them. Once the app recognises a landmark, it provides additional information on it, both from external sources such as Wikipedia and Blippar’s comprehensive knowledge graph, Blipparsphere.
The availability of the Landmark Recognition API is also a part of Blippar’s continued efforts to democratise access to AR within various verticals by opening up their APIs to the industry at large, for companies and brands to use their technology. The company provides developers with the means to create AR apps with minimal coding experience, via its Blippbuilder app creation interface.
