Vuforia to recognize logos inside a shopping center

Question

A client asked me about using Vuforia in order to recognize logos on the shop windows. Basically, they want to use logos as a QR.

Is this idea viable? Will it work pretty well? Can you tell my some alternatives to Vuforia about this?

Answer 1

Recognizing logos is hard.

Basically all image recognition algorithms rely on the same principle: trying to recognize "interest points" of the image. These interest points can for example be blobs or corners; in short, we want to look for places in an image where "things happen", compared to (for example) a large solid area painted in the same color where there is not much information to grab.

This comes to trying to recognize discriminant "details" of the image.

When applied to logos, this method tends to fail due to the fact that logos often don't have enough of such "details". Take the Nike logo for example: if corner detection is applied to it, it will only find 2 corners (the 2 ends of the accent). Blob detection will probably give no result at all. This is an extreme example, as the Nike logo is really simple, but even on more complex logos there will often not be enough details for recognition to work.

As for Vuforia: it works in this exact same way, and their web interface (Vuforia Target Manager) is very clear about it: when you upload an image on it for recognition, if there are not enough details on it, it will either warn you that results may be poor or simply reject the image.

To conclude: you can run some tests, it's still the best way to be sure of it, but I wouldn't expect great results. It will probably work for detailed logos, and fail on simpler ones.

Hope this helps!