

Show HN: Pastec, an open source image recognition platform for your mobile apps - magsoft
http://www.pastec.io/

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girinambari
I liked your business model (free API as PRO service by doing as manageable
and customization services), Good luck!

I have few question, 1) What does it return as response to API call. I feel
like API documentation is not good enough. 2) Is it text extractor tool (or)
just image classification tool?

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magsoft
Hello,

Thanks for your comment.

Pastec only allows to recognize images. You provide reference images with
their corresponding unique integer identifiers. Pastec extracts features for
each reference image and stores them in its database.

When you perform a request, Pastec compare the features of the request image
with the ones stored in the index. If it detects that the request image is
similar enough to one or more images of the index, then it returns their
identifiers.

You can for example use Pastec to recognize DVD, CD or Book covers in a mobile
app.

Currently, it does not allow to extract text from images. The documentation
indeed needs improvements. I will work on it.

I Hope I answered your questions!

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girinambari
In a nutshell at this moment it is classification tool, but not based on pre-
trained model. So, when it looks for feature index does it pick the first
available (or) it iterates for best available? good luck!

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magsoft
Inside Pastec, the images are represented using the visual word paradigm:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Word](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Word)
During indexing, each image feature is assigned to the nearest visual word
among a pre-trained set of 1 million. About 1000 visual words are extracted
per image.

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nestlequ1k
Looks great, I'm currently in the market for something like this.

Can any users give their experience using this over other alternatives? What
sort of issues do you run into with regard to speed and/or accuracy?

Thanks!

~~~
magsoft
Hello,

Thank you for your comment.

I have currently a test case with a 140 000 images index. The search time is
less than 2 seconds on 3.00GHz Core2 Duo CPU with 4 GB of RAM. The accuracy is
then, for me, satisfying . Pastec is still being developed and there are many
possible improvements to reduce this time.

It is however difficult to compare Pastec with the competition as most image
recognition APIs are not free for large databases.

