Object Recognition Apps

It’s an exciting time as recognition apps for both print and objects advance and become more accurate and thus usable. With the evolution of object recognition along with artificial intelligence (AI), more and more object and AI apps are now available for mobile devices. With advancements of computer vision and artificial intelligence (The Hien, 2017), object recognition apps become available to individuals with disabilities as well as the general market. Object recognition of labels, posters, facial recognition, text, environmental information, and images are now available and have become more and more accurate. Availability of such apps support individuals with visual impairments but also provides not only text information but also object information  to individuals with learning and intellectual disabilities.  Access to two dimensional print using both object recognition and optical character recognition and three dimensional object recognition become possible with these technologies.

Recent AT evaluations of individuals with significant learning and intellectual disabilities requiring access to information in employment has required re-exploring available apps to determine what apps are available. With the individual needs for each client and their work tasks, reviewing available apps using a feature match appeared to be the most systematic way to explore current options.

While there may indeed be additional apps omitted in my app feature match review, the primary focus of my app selections were to identify apps suited to individuals with intellectual disability, requiring minimal set up, login or problem solving required. Easy access, accuracy and dependability were the primary features desired. A caveat to providing this review includes an understanding that if use of object identification may not always be accurate, thus it should not be used in situations where safety may be at risk with it use.

The Object Recognition App Feature Match reviews the following object recognition apps, selected to determine features, device compatibility and requirements of the selected apps:

• Seeing AI app
• Third Eye
• Be My Eyes
• EyeSpy app
• iDentifi app
• TapTap See app
• CamFind app
• Look Tel Recognizer app
• Digit Eyes app
• VizWiz app

Link to Object Recognition App Feature Match document.

Apps not reviewed include Talking Goggles due to it crashing or poor recognition and Aipoly app ( Android, iOS) due to its 4.99 monthly subscription required with free trial.

What object recognition apps have you used? How have you applied them to your client’s needs?

More for your OT eTool Kit!

Carol, from OT’s with Apps

References:

The Hein, Dang Ha (2017), The Modern History of Object Recognition – Infographic, retrieved on 11/23/2017: https://medium.com/@nikasa1889/the-modern-history-of-object-recognition-infographic-aea18517c318