I’m writing an Android app that involves some form of pattern recognition to count the number of similar objects in an image. The app would be designed to work with a specific type of objects and would not involve machine learning.
Is the computation and processing within the device for such a scenario feasible or would it be better to send the image over to a remote server?
If the computation can be handled by the device, would a first generation device running on version 2.2 with 528MHz of CPU and 288MB of RAM be able to return an output within a convenient amount of time?
It completely depends on your algorithm. There’s no universal pattern recognition/image processing algorithm, even for your somewhat specific case of counting similar objects.