Almost 28 Years Later - Mobile Visual Search using Large Datasets on Handheld Hardware

In this work, we revisit the topic of Mobile Visual Search (MVS), which was wrongly neglected in recent years. Image retrieval was sparked almost 28 years ago and different variants of MVS exist in SDKs for mobile devices for 10+ years, such as in Vuforia, ARKit, or ARCore. However, there are still severe limitations that hamper the practical use of MVS in modern AR applications, such as the maximum number of image targets. We investigate a modern and tunable MVS pipeline and provide an integration mechanism, which leverages vendor-based features from ARKit or ARCore to overcome these limitations. Finally, we provide a Unity plugin and associated training utilities for users to build huge databases for mobile handheld usage.