Sightsee like never before with Blippar’s Landmark Recognition technology

We’re extremely proud to introduce our Landmark Recognition API, available now to license. This technology recognises thousands of famous landmarks worldwide -- including buildings, bridges, castles, places of worship and more. Simply point the Blippar app (on iOS or Android) at one to give it a try.

Powered by deep learning and augmented reality our landmark recognition API identifies iconic landmarks, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal and Statue of Liberty, as well as many less known 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 not location information from GPS. This gives the technology the ability to not only recognize a landmark you’re standing next to, but also one in a photo or on the cover of a magazine. Even if you’re thousands of miles away.

Our Landmark Recognition technology is extremely fast and accurate. It uses our patent-pending technology for training deep learning models to essentially eliminate false positives, which can be a major nuisance in this context since many common buildings and bridges share similarities with famous landmarks, with no decrease in accuracy. Currently, the app has a false positive rate of 0.36%¹ and accuracy of 91.6% in open set testing, both of which are unparalleled across the industry. The technology currently supports 2164 landmarks and the number keeps growing.

Recognition in the Blippar app is very accurate, as you can see in the example below. The app can distinguish between similar bridges and castles:

And even recognise the most prominent landmark depending on where exactly you point your phone. As you can see in the example below, the app identifies either the bridge or the cathedral based on the angle:

“Landmark Recognition is Blippar’s latest step in our ongoing mission to map the physical world” says Ambarish Mitra, Blippar CEO and Co-Founder. “On the heels of the AR City app, an industry breakthrough in machine learning entire cities with the potential to disrupt current maps in the navigation and tourism sectors, as well as Urban Visual Positioning, a disruption in location-based AR that leverages computer vision for better localisation accuracy than GPS alone, Blippar is continuing to change the way people interact with and experience their surroundings. This is a great way to satisfy our curiosity and discover more about the world around us.”

If you are interested in integrating our landmark recognition technology into your app or website, get in touch.

For more information, read our official press release.

¹False positive rate is measured on 3000 held-out images of buildings and bridges specifically designed to fool a landmark classifier. On standard traffic data false positive rate is less than 0.01%.