A Fast Offline Building Recognition Application on a Mobile Telephone

Today most mobile telephones come equipped with a camera. This gives rise to interesting new possibilities for applications of computer vision, such as building recognition software running locally on the mobile phone. Algorithms for building recognition need to be robust under noise, occlusion, varying lighting conditions and different points of view. We present such an algorithm using local invariant regions which allows for mobile building recognition despite the limited processing power and storage capacity of mobile phones. This algorithm was shown to obtain state of the art performance on the Zürich Building Database (91% accuracy). An implementation on a mobile phone (Sony Ericsson K700i) is presented that obtains good performance (80% accuracy) on a dataset using real-world query images taken under varying, suboptimal conditions. Our algorithm runs in the order of several seconds while requiring only around 10KB of memory to represent a single building within the local database.