The new version of Picasa (being released today) has an upgrade in facial recognition, meaning you won’t need to tag every photo.
Picasa’s facial recognition technology will ask you to identify people in your pictures that you haven’t tagged yet. Once you do and start uploading more pictures, Picasa starts suggesting tags for people based on the similarity between their face in the picture and the tags you already put in place for them.
I’d love for Flickr and Facebook to add this (as that’s where I upload most of my photos). I do love the tagging system in Facebook and really wish Flickr would introduce it - I love being able to mouse-over a photo and see who is who. But when you’re uploading loads of photos, it’s a pain to tag each one. And Flickr has its own tagging system, but it would be great if it had the facial recognition, especially as I think about 95% of my photos would feature the same 10-20 people. I get really lazy sometimes and don’t bother tagging them properly, especially if I’m uploading from my phone or doing a bulk upload.
It also sounds like there might be some funny errors from the system.
Picasa’s name tags are helpful but imperfect. The feature failed to find faces in several photos where I thought the faces were reasonably obvious. It also thought my bicycle wheel’s spokes and wife’s ear were faces. One excusable error: it thought a mask in a mural was a face, though for some reason it didn’t bother with a couple of real humans in the same mural.
(via cnet)
I’d be really curious to upload a photo of me with all my chinese relatives and see if it can tell them apart - I figure I have 11 aunties and about 400 cousins and I can’t tell most of them from each other so if software can do it then brilliant. I’ll take the software with me to Malaysia so it can tell me on the fly who I’m talking to.
This post is tagged under: innovation
