MenuMe application turns food descriptions into photos

On TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016, the hackathon team of MasterCard’s employees sketched a preliminary version of an unusual mobile application, which they called MenuMe . It recognizes the inscriptions in the restaurant menu, searches for suitable pictures for the description and displays them on the smartphone screen, using elements of augmented reality.

MenuMe uses the Vuforia platform . This platform allows you to add to your projects the functions of machine vision and augmented reality. Libraries from the Vuforia Android SDK allow you to recognize text and images, and provide ready-made functions for imposing virtual objects on a photo or video from a camera.


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Although MenuMe is still in its initial state, such an application would be very useful for travelers in a foreign country. Instead of translating the menu into your own language, you could immediately see the image of the finished dish.

So far MenuMe only demonstrates the principle of operation, and selects pictures from its database, but the working version of the application, according to the developers, will search for pictures via Google Image Search.