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iphoto '09
Playing around with iPhoto's 'Faces'
Face recognition technology isn't perfect yet.
That's certainly clear when using the "Faces" feature that is built into the recently released iPhoto '09.
Sure, the product does reasonably well at finding your friends and family in your photo collection. Tag a few photos by name and iPhoto comes up with other suggestions, often recognizing photos that are taken years apart and with vastly different looks. Heck, iPhoto even spotted me when I was a different gender.
The science behind face recognition is complex and still evolving. In general, face recognition software looks for predictable patterns--characteristics and proportions that stay constant from one photograph to another, things like the distance between the eyes or from the eyes to the mouth.
Even with things where the science is today, having help--any help--with the tedious task of tagging photos is welcome. And iPhoto can certainly find plenty of matches in your library, even if it won't spot them all.
But the real genius part is how Apple has made the process fun, even when the results aren't perfect.
Early speech recognition was also hit or miss, but it was painful to have to scream at a computer while it constantly misunderstood what you were trying to say. With face recognition, at least as built into iPhoto, the goofs are what make it fun.
The software frequently suggested that my contemporary friends and family were actually my 80-something cousin, my 90-something great aunt, or both. iPhoto also confused Bill Gates with our friend's 3-year-old. And among the suggestions for former CNET colleague Joris Evers was a shot of Wayne Gretzky that I had taken at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. … Read more
First taste of iLife '09: iPhoto's face recognition
Jasmine posted her brief sneak peek at iLife '09 yesterday with a slide show, and it's pretty clear that major improvements have come to Apple's suite of lifestyle applications, most notably iPhoto '09, iMovie '09, and GarageBand '09. Since I'm an amateur photography nerd with aspirations of rock stardom, I'm most interested in iPhoto and GarageBand, though the new iMovie may be enough for me to whip out my Flip camcorder and record more than just dogs riding on skateboards. Of course, iWeb '09 has a few updates, too. I have just got through the iPhoto '09 face recognition hurdle, and am just starting on the rest of the iLife suite. So here's an in-depth look at the facial recognition bit of iPhoto, with more to come later.
iPhoto '09 Lets start with the belle of the ball, iPhoto '09. Why do I say that? Because the new Faces and Places feature on iPhoto '09 was definitely one of the biggest news out of Phil Schiller's Macworld keynote. While iPhoto '08 introduced Events, which lets you group photos based on the dates they were taken, iPhoto '09 introduced three new features that got the Mac community buzzing--facial recognition, geotagging, and social network support. For the facial recognition, you don't have to tag every single photo you have with a name and a face; the idea is that iPhoto '09 will be smart enough to do the facial recognition for you. However, it will only work after you do the necessary legwork to make it all happen.
Assuming you don't have photos in your iPhoto library already, you'll have to import them. Me, I have about 3,500 photos sitting in my Aperture library on the laptop, and that's not even counting the more than 10,000 photos I have in my external hard drive at home. So if you're a big photography dork like me, it'll take some time for all the photos to import over. Once that happens, you can immediately start identifying faces and names. Sometimes iPhoto will be smart enough to detect faces for you, and sometimes it won't be. If it does detect a face, it'll display a square over what it thinks is a face, with a placeholder name "unknown face" underneath it. If it doesn't detect a face, you'll have to hit the "Add Missing Face" button on the bottom left, select the face, and add a name. Once you identify a face with a name, you can go to the Faces corkboard, select a face, and iPhoto '09 will scout out your entire library to find photos with a similar face. Once it does, it's up to you to go through the results to confirm or not confirm if the photos really do show that person. This is how the facial recognition training works.
