As a developer, there are many things you can do with an image: filters, face detection, object recognition, and more. Last week, Covify, an app that uses image recognition to scan music albums and add them to Spotify, won the Next Web Hackathon in Amsterdam.
Covify takes advantage of a lesser known feature of OpenTok, the getImgData() API, which captures a base64 representation of the image on your webcam. Covify used this call to grab the image from the webcam, then send it to their servers to scan it and identify which album it is, then return to the user a link to add the album to Spotify.
This is a clever use of the API. When you have image data, there are a number of things you can do with it:
- Combine it with the Face.com API to get the identity of someone in an image, and detect if they are smiling, wearing glasses, or get their age or gender.
- Use the open-source Zebra Crossing library to scan for barcodes in an image, then use the Amazon Product Lookup API to find what product it is.
- If you’re concerned about bad user behavior, you can pair it with the jQuery face detection library to be check that users are showing their face, and not something else.
- Pair it with the Aviary image filter API to create a photo manipulation app, like Meet me in the Photobooth.
- Compare two fames against each other with OpenCV to get motion data in a video.
If you have other creative ideas on how to use the getImgData() API, post them in the comments. Congrats to Covify on their win in Amsterdam!