Covify wins hackathon with Spotify - IQ Engines mashup

Covify is a cool new app that lets people add their CDs to Spotify by scanning the cover. The team behind Covify built the app during a 30-hour hackathon using the IQ Engines and Spotify APIs. They won the TNW Kings of Code Hack Battle in Amsterdam and generated lots of media attention for the concept.

Covify is currently in beta. You can try it out at http://www.covify.com/beta/ using your webcam or sign up for the iPhone beta.

Here’s how Covify works: Just hold a CD up to your webcam, or use the iPhone app to scan the cover. This triggers an API request to the VisionIQ server, which identifies the album (“Norah Jones Little Broken Hearts”). Covify queries the Spotify API and if it finds a match, the app will add the songs to your playlist and start playing them.

We love seeing new ideas like this from our developers — maybe yours will be next.

New release of oMoby and VisionIQ iPhone SDK

A new release of oMoby is now available in the iPhone App Store. This free reference design showcases the latest mobile visual search technology available from IQ Engines. We’ve added faster barcode processing and support for Data Matrix and Code 128 barcodes, making oMoby the most complete all-in-one app for image recognition and barcode scanning.

It’s easy to integrate oMoby’s features into your mobile app using our SDK. Download version 1.2 from the Developer Center today to take advantage of these great features:
  • On-device  image recognition
  • Server-based image recognition
  • QR Code, Data Matrix, Code 128, UPC E, UPC A, EAN 8, EAN 13
  • Crowdsourcing

Similarity Sort

One of the most exciting things we’re working on now at IQ Engines is an innovative computer vision module called Similarity Sort. This new feature (coming soon) makes it possible to run a visual search on difficult 3D objects, like produce. In this example, the leftmost photo is the visual query, and the ten image row is a weighted ranking of similar images from a large dataset (in this case, produce).

Similarity Sort will dramatically improve the VisionIQ experience by ensuring that a visual query to your private trained dataset will return a sorted list of matches. I would love to hear your feedback about this feature and how it can benefit your applications.  

3 New APIs for Dataset Management

We’ve added 3 new APIs to give you finer grain control over the objects in your private image dataset: image retrieve, image delete and image append. With these programmatic API-calls you’ll be able to incrementally grow and update your datasets.

Image append

This API request will append images to an existing object. You can use this API call when you find new images that relate to existing objects. Adding more images to an object improves computer vision results.
http://www.iqengines.com/apidocs/apis/object-image-list-post-api.html

Image retrieve

This API request will retrieve an image from your computer vision database. You can use this API call to get more information about an image, such as when it was uploaded.
http://www.iqengines.com/apidocs/apis/image-detail-get-api.html

Image delete

This API request will delete an image from your computer vision database and remove its reference to the associated object. Unlike the object delete functionality, using this API call you can remove individual images, not all of the images associated with an object.
http://www.iqengines.com/apidocs/apis/image-detail-delete-api.html