Find matching image in Windows 8 App

Question

I'd like to build an app for Windows 8 / Windows Store where a user can take a picture with his device and the app will return an image from a database which looks the closest to it. For example, you scan the front of a book and you get the right product image from the db. Now, I know this isn't an easy task and so I was wondering, if there are any libraries working on Win8 I could use. I heard about tools like OpenCV, SURF and AForge.net, but can I use those on Windows 8? I hope you guys can give me a point to start.

Answer 1

This is a very general question and thus can only yield a very general answer. Since you are targeting tablet devices you need to remember that they do not have nearly the processing power of a normal PC. Other applications on other devices that offer this type of functionality typically offload a lot of the work to their servers. I believe most of them do very little pre-processing on the device (normalizing to the correct resolution or doing some histogram generation) and then upload that to a server that has the databases and heavy analysis tools to do the comparisons.

The easiest way to start an application like this from the Windows 8 perspective would be to get an application that can take the picture and normalize it to a specific resolution. Once you have that, build functionality to upload that to a server. You then need to implement server code to use tools like AForge to perform the image processing that would allow you to compare images.

There are tons of great resources on how to compare images and you are going to have to wade through them and find ones that work for you. To start you might want to read this thread:

Image comparison - fast algorithm

In the end you need to decide what algorithm works best for the images you want to compare.