PeakLens

PeakLens

About this app

PeakLens will transform your mountain activity into an amazing experience, allowing you to get a deeper knowledge of the mountains and to create stunning photos enriched with the most accurate information about the peaks in view.

Discover the names and locations of mountain and hills around you while hiking, climbing, skiing, trekking or enjoying your favorite outdoor activity. Test your mountain knowledge and share your pictures of stunning skyline views with your friends on social networks.

FEATURES
- Precisely identifies mountain peaks and hills in real-time.
- Works worldwide: from Alps, Himalayas, Rocky Mountains and Andes up to the smallest hills, anywhere on Earth.
- Corrects GPS, compass, magnetometer and gyroscope errors with artificial intelligence.
- Works online and offline with pre-downloaded maps.
- High quality photographs with peak names in overlay.
- Knows position, height and distance from you of more than 200.000 peaks.
- Works both with Imperial and Metric unit systems.

PeakLens is a novel Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality app for mountain lovers, hikers and trekkers. It is the result of years of research in artificial intelligence and computer vision, based on a novel algorithm that identifies mountain peaks in real time with high precision. Its core is a software component that compares what you actually see in the camera of your mobile phone or tablet with a virtual panorama, created from a digital 3D landscape model of the Earth. By matching what you see and the virtual panorama, PeakLens automatically corrects most errors that come from the imprecision of the compass and GPS sensor, giving you always the most accurate peak positioning.

RESOURCES
- Digital Elevation Model: the digital elevation model of the SRTM project (https://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm) is used for calculating panoramic views.
- Peaks: the Peaks dataset is extracted from Openstreetmap.com.
OpenStreetMap is open data, licensed under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL).

PeakLens is a research result of Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informatica e Bioingegneria.

For any comments, questions or feedbacks contact us at [e-mail]!

Ratings and reviews

Slow app, just a fail on so many levels. It makes you recalibrate your compass etc every time by waving your phone in an 8 pattern, so get ready to look like a crazy person on the mountain. Then, it doesn't show all the peaks in the area. And finally, as a cherry on top, you take your photos of the mountain peaks, get back home and realize it hasn't saved a single one of them. 😂 What a joke. It sucks because there are very few of these kind of apps for Android.

Good concept, good enough for approximately identifying peaks, but inaccurate. VERY much needs a method to provide a manual adjustment once calibrated. It's always off by a significant amount. So somewhat useless in the end. Also needs an extra small text/label option. Labels take up too much room.

Great idea, but the app is far from perfect: * For offline mode, it requires too much permissions. I do not want to give it permission to access my photos and other files. The app could have stored the data in /sdcard/Android/data, which is possible even without storage permission. * The AI finds peaks even in a room. That would be OK (and expected) for compass-based detection, but it “finds” and moves all the peaks after a while. This does not look very reliable.

What's new

Minor improvements and bug correction