Icon scanning: Towards next generation QR codes

Undoubtedly, a key feature in the popularity of smartmobile devices is the numerous applications one can install. Frequently, we learn about an application we desire by seeing it on a review site, someone else´s device, or a magazine. A user-friendly way to obtain this particular application could be by taking a snapshot of its corresponding icon and being directed automatically to its download link. Such a solution exists today for QR codes, which can be thought of as icons with a binary pattern. In this paper we extend this to App-icons and propose a complete system for automatic icon-scanning: it first detects the icon in a snapshot and then recognizes it. Icon scanning is a highly challenging problem due to the large variety of icons (~500K in App-Store) and background wallpapers. In addition, our system should further deal with the challenges introduced by taking pictures of a screen. Nevertheless, the novel solution proposed in this paper provides high detection and recognition rates. We test our complete icon-scanning system on icon snapshots taken by independent users, and search them within the entire set of icons in App-Store. Our success rates are high and improve significantly on other methods.