First, sorry abour my poor english.
I'm planning to build an augmented reality app for android mobile platform and the main feature is the ability of the user to take a shoot of a shop and the application recognize the shop that he is photographing. I Do not know if the best option would be to use an image recognition api as many existing, but I think it would be something more specific. Maybe own a bank of images would help.
My plan was to have a database of stores with their locations and use one of many tools for image recognition and search in my database to the same location. But I found that all search engines images (kooba, iqengines, etc.) are not free and not a little cheaper. So would a tool that could use a limited catalog, like shops images in a shopping mall for example and send photos of smartphones (both android or iphone).
Can someone help me get started?
I've been doing something similar for my dissertation at University. I developed an application which detected signposts, read the content on them, then personalised / prioritised it depending on the user's preferences (with mixed success).
As part of this I had to look into Image Recognition.
Two things you may want to look at are:
The Qualcomm QCAR SDK. This was a little bit too image specific for what I was after, but if you were to do it on a small range of shops it may work. This would require a collection of shop images to match against - I don't know how successful it would be.
What I implemented used JavaCV (a conversion of OpenCV), which also has an Android conversion. It seems to allow for image recognition a bit more generally than the previous option which is why I used it. It would require you to run your own training to create a classifier though (unless there is another way of doing image recognition within it). But there are a number of guides which can help with that.
I used it for recognising signposts with reasonable success off just some basic training, though did tend to recognise a number of false positives.
Within my application I then used location to match up with previous detections etc.
Hopefully these may get you started.