Bandai Japan has made their image recognition and search service to let you retrieve music cd information by submitting the photo of music cd cover.

According to the company,

The technology, "Search by Camera! ER Search", is based on the image recognition technology “ViPR”, which was developed as robot element technology by the North American company, Evolution Robotics Inc., and integrated into mobile phones by Bandai Networks. After starting up the application, which is loaded onto the mobile phone terminal, and photographing various media with the camera, data is transmitted to a server. The service allows information about products and other objects to be searched easily.

To use the image search service, a java appliation need to be downloaded from Bandai and installed on your phone. Once you have submitted the search query (photo) in the application, the service will return an URL to a wap site. You can then open the site to read the album and artist information. Bandai has now indexed 150,000 cd into their database.

The service is currently available for Japan mobile users only at the moment. The company has actually started a similar service one year ago on NEC N902iS mobile phone.

Source [Bandai]

related article

Photo2Search: Search Query Base on Photo
http://www.slashphone.com/64/4119.html