Solve Math Equations with Camera Phone

Microblink, a startup firm with lot of promise launches its PhotoMath app. If you are wondering what PhotoMath is all about, let me say, it is based on text recognition technology and solves mathematical equations for you simply by clicking your phone camera. When you take a snap of your mathematical equation on your phone camera, the PhotoMath app works in real time recognizing text and solves mathematical expressions.

How cool is that? Microblink has been developing the technology for the past two years. The company has already been selling its core technology to potential business in the field of banking sector. “We are not an educational company, we are promoting our machine vision technology with PhotoMath,” said co-founder and CEO Damir Sabol.

The other products of Microblink are blinkOCR, blinkID, photopay and blinkbarcode. The idea remains to be real-time text recognition, barcode & ID scanning for your apps. The company is based in London and Croatia.

Excerpt of a Question and Answer session by Judges at Disrupt London Tech Event (posted on TechCrunch)

• Q: This is very neat. It seems like a plot to get a six-year old to finally get a smartphone. The question that I have is whether that’s the basis for a standalone business.
• A: We started in the banking sector; we have 14 banks using our technology. We have developed this technology over the past three years, and we are already making money now in the enterprise space.
• Q: What is your fundamental breakthrough?
• A: We created algorithms specifically for mobile devices. We have a product that is called PhotoPay. You scan payment slips. This is the technology that we used to build PhotoMath. PhotoMath goes further when it comes to accuracy and speed. It also showcases our technology.
• Q: Does the technology work on static images?
• A: We use video frames. We combine the OCR results of these consecutive video frames.
• Q: Does it work with handwritten text?
• A: Not yet. It works but it’s quite a difficult problem.
• Q: In PhotoMath, does it show the steps to solve an equation?
• A: Yes, it’s already there.
• Q: Are you charging for the technology?
• A: We provide a free SDK, and depending of the monetization strategy of our partners, it’s a revenue share or a license per year.