AN IRISH company’s mobile phone application that can identify a painting from a snapshot has won an award and $100,000 (€66,000) from Google.

Plink, an Irish start-up company set up by two Oxford University computer science doctoral students, took a top prize in the education and reference section of Google’s second global Android Developers Challenge (ADC2). Android is Google’s mobile phone operating system.

Plink’s “PlinkArt” application, which can be downloaded for free from Google’s Android applications website, allows a person to identify a work of art just by taking a picture of it with a cameraphone.

The image is sent to a database of images and PlinkArt’s software will then recognise and identify the image and return relevant information, such as Wikipedia articles.

“We’re so excited about this. The award will really help us create some visibility as a start- up,” said Plink co-founder Mark Cummins, who is from Dublin.

He said there were no stipulations about how the award was spent, but noted that he and co- founder James Philbin plan to invest the full amount into Plink, which is developing image recognition search engines.

The PlinkArt application utilises technology developed by the two founders as part of their PhD projects in robotics and in search engine technologies.

Cummins has been working on vision technologies for robots for his PhD. “I wanted a robot to be able to realise where it was,” he said, which required the robot’s camera “eyes” to view a room and search a database of images to identify a location.

Plink, incorporated a few months ago, has received support from Enterprise Ireland and an early €1,000 grant from an IQ Content competition for start-up companies. The company was also a finalist at a Mini SeedCamp competition in London earlier this year.

Ironically, Cummins said the announcement from Google of their success in winning the award went directly to his spam folder – no doubt due to a subject heading offering congratulations and text noting a financial award.