Is is possible to use Vuforia without a camera?

Question

Is it possible to use Vuforia without a camera for image tracking?

Basically I would like a function I could call with an image as a indata parameter and coordinates of a image target as a result. Does that exist?

Answer 1

It is unfortunately not possible. I've been looking for such an option myself several times while working on a Moodstocks (image recognition SDK) / Vuforia mashup (see these 2 blog posts if you are interested in it), but the Vuforia SDK prevents the use of any other source than the camera.

I guess the main reason for this is that the camera management is fully handled internally by the Vuforia SDK, probably in order to make it easier to use as managing the camera by ourselves is at best a boring task (lines and lines of code to repeat in each project...), at worst a huge pain in the ass (especially on Android where there are sometimes devices than don't behave as expected).

By the way, it looks to me like the Vuforia SDK is not the best solution you can find for your use case: it is mainly an augmented-reality SDK, focussed on real-time tracking, which imply working with a camera stream... so using it to do "simple" image recognition looks really overkill!