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Cloud Recognition

This tutorial will show you how to create databases and add markers to Pikkart's Cloud Recognition Service using our CRS web application. In a later tutorial we will connect to the CRS service and recognize the added marker using Pikkart's Android SDK.

In your browser of choice go to https://developer.pikkart.com/, register yourself and sign in. You should be automatically brought to your Control panel, if not click the Control panel menu item as show in the following image:

The Control panel allow you to manager your markers, check your Cloud recognition and Cloud API plans and check your Apps and Licenses.

With Pikkart's CRS you can have one or more cloud plans shared among all your apps. Within your plan you can create multiple marker databases for each app and add markers to them. The global number of markers you can add to the system (between all databases and all apps) depends on the cloud plan of your choice.

Clicking on the Cloud and API Plans section bring you to a new page showing which cloud plan you own, how many markers you have, the markers limit, the number of scan limit of your plan, etc. 

Going back and clicking in the Apps and Licenses section bring you to the registered licenses page. This page lists all the SDK licenses you own. Each app has two additional buttons on the right, the first allows you to edit your app name and specify the Android package name and iOS bundle id; the second button allow you to download the app license file you need to use Pikkart's SDK. 

Going back and click in the Markers Manager section. From the Marker Manager you can select your app and add markers inside one or multiple databases of your choice (see the our tutorial for more details).

The marker manager dashboards lists some statistics about your app CRS use: the total number of markers, today's marker views count, the total number of API calls for this month and a graph of the last 7 days marker views.

Clicking either on Markers Details or the Databases menu item on the left brings you to the markers databases menu, where you can create additional databases or add markers to a database.

Click on the Add database item to add a database to the CRS. This will bring you to the database creation page. Name your database, select of you want to create a cloud database or a local DB (local DBs allows you to create and download marker files to be used locally by your app). You can add a database wide Custom data to it, that custom data can be accessed by your app through Pikkart's SDK on a successful marker recognition. Then save it.

You will be brought back to the previous page, showing all your databases. Write down the cloud code of your DB. That code will be used in our tutorials and is used to tell the SDK on which DBs it should search for a marker.

Now click on the created DB Marker list button. This will bring you to the DB markers list. The list is currently empty, so lets add a marker to it by clicking the Add marker button:

The Add marker page is straightforward: give the marker a name, upload an image, set the date on which it will be made available, add custom data to it (as plain text or BASE64 encoded file, max 8K bytes) and set the width of the marker (in meters). This will allow you to have real-life correct measures in your AR experience.

Click SAVE to add the marker. For a short while the marker will be processed by the system before being available for search, as in the following image:

Notice the unique id field, this is the one the used by the SDK. Reload the page and the marker should have been computed and be active. The Status field should be "Successfully encoded". The system gives back  also some synthetic rating about the marker performance on a mobile device. Three stars are the norm, one star is ok-ish, 5 stars is a very good marker. The two ratings are relative only to the recognition and tracking on the device, not the CRS recognition.