IIIT-Hyd develops Heritage App

One can take picture at a heritage site or monument and obtain associated annotations on a mid-end mobile phone instantly

The Centre for Visual Information Technology (CVIT), a research centre at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-Hyd), has developed Heritage App, a computer vision application on mobile phones. Using this app, one can take a picture at a heritage site or monument and obtain associated annotations on a mid-end mobile phone instantly.

For instance, if a tourist or a student visits a heritage monument and is interested in specific artistic details of the structures, he/she can query the app with concerned images and the relevant information is returned as text or audio.

“The app, which is all about taking large number of pictures, extracting information and storing in a condensed form, is still in a lab-prototype stage. It should be available for the common man for free download hopefully in a year from now,” Anoop M Namboodiri, assistant professor at, IIIT-Hyd, told Business Standard.

CVIT, which has four faculty members and over 60 research students including a couple of PhDs working on different projects, has already demonstrated the app on Golconda Fort in Hyderabad and Hampi Temple in Karnataka with a dataset of around 5,000 images covering most parts or locations at these sites.

“We can also package this app with face-recognition algorithms etc. These, however, are future directions,” Namboodiri said, adding that CVIT was also working on areas like medical image processing, primarily focusing on analysis of retinal images for diagnostic purposes.

<B>Ties up with Polycom </B><BR>
Polycom Inc, a Nasdaq-listed, over $1.5-billion company that provides unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) solutions, on Tuesday signed an MoU with IIIT-Hyderabad for collaborative research and development of new video collaboration products and solutions.

The MoU envisages joint research in developing video technology solutions, which will be commercialised by Polycom globally. The company is also looking at other institutions in India for similar joint research collaborations, Balaji Iyer, general manager (R&D), Polycom India, told mediapersons here.

According to Vasudeva Varma, dean of research at IIIT-Hyd, working with Polycom will give the institution access to a much bigger playground to harness its research capabilities, especially in potential technological areas like computer vision, pattern recognition and cloud computing.

“At present, around 40 per cent of our revenues are flowing in from externally-funded research projects. Our goal is to further increase this so that students get to pay lesser fees,” he added.