Recently, Science Daily posted an article about a new image-recognition system designed specifically for mobile devices. This program, which was a regional winner in the European Satellite Navigation Competition sponsored by ESA’s Technology Transfer Program, is able to provide information about what you see when you see it.

Cleverly dubbed “the eye-Phone,” this system combines satellite navigation localization services, advanced object recognition and relevant information retrieved from the Internet to send real time preprocessed information on the selected object to your mobile phone. This novel use of satellite technology, created by Ernst Pechtl and Hans Geiger, uses Apollo, an artificial intelligence system that can carry out object recognition within images. Pechtl asserts that Apollo is “self-learning and after a short and very simple training session it can identify any object in the world.”

Pechtl goes on to suggest that the identified object “could be a building, a mountain, a tree, plant or a special event such as a local festival. The amount of information you receive depends on you, if you want to know more you just click the ‘more button’ and you trigger a more detailed search responding to your profile of interest. Applications include tourism, education, remote healthcare, security, science, etc.”

Pechtl and Geiger’s company, SuperWise Technologies, plans to team up with mobile phone operators, who would provide the eye-Phone functionality as an additional function for subscription. It will be partly located on the phone and partly in a central processing system of a cooperating image archives.

Science Daily reports that a prototype should be ready sometime in the middle of this year, and Pechtl expects that it will take another 12 to 18 months to work out deals with mobile phone operators, find partners and negotiate agreements with database information providers before the eye-Phone functionality can be offered to mobile phone users.