Vivino and Vuforia's Image Recognition Solution Make a Great Pairing

When faced with a wall full of wine or a multipage wine list, it is a challenge for even a seasoned wine connoisseur to select the ideal bottle. Wine shoppers typically see only the advertised price and description, but have no additional information. To solve this dilemma, the world’s most downloaded wine app, Vivino, turns your smartphone into your perfect partner in wine.

Vivino enables users to take a photo of any wine label or wine list with their mobile device, and it instantly identifies the wine delivering ratings, reviews and average pricing for every bottle. To deliver this experience, Vivino required reliable image recognition on a massive scale.

First, recognizing the precise bottle in your hand is a significant challenge. Not only does the app need to recognize one brand from the next, but it must also discern the vintages within a brand. To accomplish this, Vivino relies on Vuforia’s advanced computer vision technology to identify the exact wine label captured by the app.

Second, to handle the massive number of unique wines, Vivino uses the Vuforia Cloud Recognition Service  to store each wine label image. Vuforia then matches the incoming scans from the app with the appropriate bottle. By hosting the images in the cloud, Vivino can update this database dynamically, and manage millions of image targets for a single app without updating the app itself.

By quickly and reliability connecting wine lovers at all levels of expertise with valuable information, Vivino has become the world’s largest wine community with 20 million users around the globe. Vivino’s massive community of wine drinkers provides them with the ability to crowdsource Top Wine Lists, and Vivino even has an e-commerce platform that connects wine merchants and producers with their community.