Augmented reality (AR) is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. A device can be used to generate data based on an image captured with the device. The device may constantly scan and capture images and send them to an AR server for recognition. Once an image matches with a stock image in the database of the AR server, the device then downloads the three-dimensional model from the AR server. The constant uploading of scanned images from the device to the server and the constant downloading of the three-dimensional models may add data traffic to limited and valuable network bandwidth between the device and AR server. An aspect of the invention provides a server comprising a network communication interface configured to: communicate with a plurality of devices, and receive, from a first device from the plurality of devices, an image captured by an optical sensor of the first device; one or more hardware processors configured to: generate a primary content dataset comprising a first set of images and corresponding virtual content, the first set of images including a core set of images, retrieve virtual content associated with the image in response to the first device determining that the first set of images does not include the image received from the first device, and communicate, via the network communication interface, to the first device, the virtual content associated with the image received from the first device, the first device being configured to update a contextual content dataset with the virtual content associated with the image received from the device; and a storage device coupled to the one or more hardware processors, the storage device comprising the primary content dataset, a secondary content dataset corresponding to the contextual content dataset of the plurality of devices, and a third content dataset comprising virtual content not included in the primary and secondary content datasets.
Contextual local image recognition dataset