Since early on, we have built our image recognition platform not only for our own apps, but also opened it to developers from around the world in the form of an API. This is motivated by our observation that users are not served best with one image recognition app for all purposes, but rather multiple niche products – each with its own unique use case and business potential. It is simply impossible for a single company to cover all of those use cases properly. Thus, our API has been quite a success with hundreds of accounts deployed.

Today, we announce a brand new release of our API. The biggest news that it is much faster. Recognition times below 1s are now possible. We achieved this by optimizing the whole query path and stripping out unnecessary overheads. This also brings API users much more granular control over how much meta-data they want to store and retrieve with each recognitions result. Furthermore, we also offer an Android demo application, which makes development of a simple app much easier.

What’s new in detail:

• Amount of returned metadata can be chosen for each individual request. If you only need a bare image recognition, you don’t have to parse all those metadata anymore. And you get the recognition results faster as a bonus.
• Extensible interface. Lacking something in our API? Let us know, so we can rectify that. The API is ready to go beyond image matching and we have several things in the pipeline. Stay tuned!
• Quirk free. Our previous query API was built around our apps and some of our API users had to work around its special behaviors. No more hacks! Ever.

These new features allow for new kinds of applications, also especially in the field of augmented reality, thanks to the faster recognition.

For the Android demo app, it lets you set basic config such as group ids, compresssion etc. via a dedicated UI. This way you can test the parameters that work best easily, and then take over the code into your own project. The screenshots below illustrate some details of the app:

API demo-app: settings screen. Allows for API specifying request parameters via a graphical user interface

API demo app: result screen. Shows meta data for matched reference image, as well as paramaters such as timing etc,

Sample code, the android demo app, and the documentation of the new API functions can be found in our github account as usual:
https://github.com/kooaba/kooaba-api/tree/beta/query_api_v2