Pixuate helps developers build faster image processing applications

Friday October 10, 2014 , 3 min Read

Pixuate is an image processing SaaS platform which provides image processing APIs and tools for developers to build applications which uses template matching, face recognition, object recognition and character recognition seamlessly. It bundles all of these tools in a simple web API interface which helps developers build image processing applications faster on all platforms.

Prathviraj Palekar started Pixuate in the middle of 2013 and launched its public beta in September 2014. Prithvi leads the team along with Ravindra Datiskop, who is an expert in cloud computing technologies, and who happened to be Prathvi's project guide during his graduation. Pavan and Sandeep joined them as the team was ready to launch the product and gained traction with their help. Sandeep says that currently most of their clients are US based as the adoption of this technology in India is slow. They are based out of Belgaum district in Karnataka and have a sales presence in Bangalore and San Francisco Bay area.

face_recognition — Before starting Pixuate, Prathvi was working on a healthcare application, and doing this on a mobile platform was a difficult task. Sandeep shares that this made Prathvi realize that there was potential in developing a platform serving on cloud architecture, which can support and run these use-cases better.

For instance, Uber uses a service similar to make our life easier instead of typing every character from your credit card. It scans your credit card details using image processing and character recognition technology and uses this for payment processing.

A developer will have to set up multiple tools for image processing functionalities and there is no support for different languages and platforms. This will take a long time for a developer depending on the application and eventually increases the cost and time to market entry. With Pixuate, Sandeep says that it makes developers' life easy. "Pixuate is primarily a developer tool. You don’t need to learn new technologies to use features. Developers can simply ‘add’ features by using the APIs. That way, as a developer, you can release an app with all our advanced image processing technology within just a month. Compare that with seven to eight months of trying to code the technology yourself."

The market size of face recognition technology is expected to be a USD 6.5 billion by 2018. And for image processing, it is estimated to grow from USD 9.5 billion in 2014 to USD 25.65 billion by 2019 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.6% in next five years.

They have a wide range of applications, for instance, the optical character recognition (OCR) technology can be applied for credit cards, business cards, loyalty cards, PAN card, Aadhar card and can be used for a lot more use-cases. "With increasing measures of security, 2-factor authentication is increasing. We are one amongst the few providers offering native face authentication on mobile devices which can be used as a replacement for SMS based 2-factor authentication," shares Sandeep.