The PlinkArt mobile phone application which recognises paintings
Two Irish students have just scooped a $100,000 (€66,000) prize from Google for their mobile phone application which recognises paintings.
Plink, the start-up company of Oxford University computer science postgraduate students Mark Cummins and James Philbin, took a top prize in Google’s second global Android Developers Challenge (ADC2).
Android is Google’s mobile phone operating system. The students’ free “PlinkArt” app allows a person to identify a work of art by taking a picture of it with a camera phone.
The image is checked against a database of images, then PlinkArt’s image recognition identifies it and returns relevant information such as Wikipedia articles.
The PlinkArt application uses technology that the two students developed as part of their PhD projects in robotics and search engine technologies.
Google and spam
Ironically, the email from Google announcing that they had been shortlisted went directly to Mark Cummins’s spam folder in his Gmail account.
It was probably quarantined due to a subject line saying “Congratulations, your application was selected” and text noting a financial award. “Your application, PlinkArt, was chosen by users and judges as the #1 winner in Education/Reference. You’ve won $100,000!”
More features
“We’re really happy that users liked the app,” the students say on their blog. “We’ve already had loads of suggestions of new things people would like to see in PlinkArt, and the Android prize means that we can keep working to make cool new features.”
There are several possible commercial spin-offs too. For example, if you find a painting you like, you could order a print to hang on your wall.
Learn more
Find out more about the PlinkArt app and where to download the application
Learn about facial recognition software
Read about the other winners in the Android Developer Challenge (ADC2)
