Photo Finder finds contacts photos and suggests names for them when it thinks it knows the correct identity.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Start-up Face.com announced a Facebook application on Tuesday called Photo Finder that can identify your contacts' faces--and your own--on the social-networking site.
The software analyzes photos among your contacts, suggesting tags for faces it recognizes and monitoring new uploads for more. The software presents an array of your contacts' photos, letting you accept or reject suggested names for the people the application has identified.
In my not-so-extensive testing, I found that the face recognition technology really does make it easier to discover photos of people you know. It surfaced dozens of untagged pictures among my network of contacts, all with the correct name suggested.
We have 100 invitations for the application, which is in alpha testing. Click here if you want one--first come, first served.
Since those photographed were generally shown in their own photo galleries, it wouldn't have been tough for to find them on my own, but the application was more useful in uncovering unknown images when dealing with people posted on others' photo galleries. I didn't try it long enough to see how well it spotted photos of me showing up in others' photos, which strikes me as one use case in which people would be particularly interested.
Face recognition in photos can be a powerful tool because it means computers can know people's identities. That photo metadata is information that computers can process, for example, when supplying search results. Apple built face recognition into its newest version of iPhoto, and Google has the technology in its Picasa Web Albums site for photo sharing.
Not integrated with Facebook
One key point, though: the identification tags that Photo Finder supplies are visible only through the application. They aren't integrated with Facebook's tag system, so the implications and actions you take through Photo Finder are limited only to that application.
Photo Finder presents photos with suggested tags at the top and known tags at the bottom for each contact.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)"Tags in Photo Finder will not persist in Facebook's main photo application. Tags assigned in Photo Finder can be rejected by the tagee, if they also use Photo Finder," the company said.
Face.com leaves privacy matters of Photo Finder up to Facebook itself. "Photo Finder has nothing to do with privacy. It scans photos that have already been shared with you. We respect the privacy settings set up by Facebook, so you don't have to manage privacy in two different places," the company said.
But in practice, Photo Finder does reveal just how publicly you're sharing your photos, and widespread use of the technology will make it easier for others to find images of specific people among their network of contacts.
When I told one contact of mine I'd just tagged her in a bunch of photos a computer just found, she wrote back to me, "I'll admit it freaks me out a bit. There has always been something about Facebook or social networking that sits on the hairy edge of a bad idea. This doesn't seem to help the cause. (It) does cause me to think again about what I post. I am probably not a poster child of best judgment."
Promising but clunky
Overall, I found the technology promising but a bit clunky. It might have worked better, if I only used Facebook to keep track of a handful of close friends and family members, but instead, Photo Finder presented me with 38 pages of friends for me to sift through to identify. It spotlighted one facet of the conundrum of personal vs. professional use of social-networking sites: I have a lot of professional contacts whose smiling-with-friends in-the-restaurant and holding-the-cute-baby photos I don't really care about.
Because you can set up watch lists for friends you care about, notifying you of future uploads of photos of people you do care about, keeping on top of new additions likely would be easier to manage. And, of course, you can cut to the chase by typing in the names of specific people you care about. They have to have their permissions set to allow you to tag their photos, though, for the application to work.
What about making money out of the technology? The Israeli-based start-up is cagey for now.
"At the moment, the focus is on launching the technology and making sure that it scales well at (the) Web level," the company said in a statement. But Face.com does have aspirations beyond a Facebook application.
"Face.com is the company behind this technology. That's a pretty premium domain, and likely, it will be the host for other uses of their facial-recognition software," the company said. Face.com is "starting with Photo Finder, a facial-recognition and discovery app for Facebook. This facial recognition is highly accurate, efficient, and built for the Web; it's able to scan through millions of photos and correctly identify faces at high speed, with a high level of accuracy."
MONTEREY, Calif.--Get ready for a new era in which your camera knows not just when you took a picture but who's in it, too.
Many cameras today can detect the faces of those being photographed, which is handy for guiding the camera to set its exposure, focus, and color balance properly. But the more difficult challenge of face recognition is more useful after the photo has been taken.
University of California-San Diego researchers have turned expression-recognition technology into an art exhibit showing the increasingly strained efforts by models to maintain a chipper smile for more than an hour. A buzzer goes off when a waning smile sends a monitor into the red zone.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)That's because of a concept called autotagging, one of a number of technologies that make digital photography qualitatively different from the film photography of the past.
Tags of descriptive data can be attached to digital photos, and they help people find and organize pictures. The only problem is that tagging your photos, today a laborious manual task, is like eating your vegetables. It's good for you but a lot of people don't like it.
With autotagging, the camera attaches tags as the pictures are taken. Today, cameras embed timestamps in photos, which makes it possible to sift through pictures by date. But be honest here--how reliably can you remember exactly when you took that picture of your darling daughter a year or two ago that you'd like to e-mail to her grandparents? Being able to screen for photos only of a particular person could dramatically speed up the search process.
Face recognition requires computational horsepower that is hard to fit into the confines of a digital camera, but one company likely to help make it a reality is Fotonation, which already supplies face-detection software for dozens of camera models from Samsung, Pentax, and others.
The computational challenge is reduced by the fact that most folks tend to photograph the same set of 25 or 30 people, Eric Zarakov, Fotonation's vice president of marketing, said in an interview here at the 6sight digital imaging conference. A camera could be "trained" to recognize just those particular people.
He wouldn't comment on whether Fotonation plans to sell such software to camera makers, but it sure looks likely. "We're looking at a lot of stuff. That would be a natural extension" of today's product lines, Zarakov said.
One camera maker willing to mention its interest in autotagging is Panasonic. "A lot of thought is going into how to tag photos so you can retrieve them at a moment's notice," said Alex Fried, national marketing manager for imaging at Panasonic's Consumer Electronics Co. But he wouldn't go into specifics: "There are things we have in the works that will help benefit consumers going forward."
And faces aren't the only aspect of autotagging that's likely to show up in cameras. Location, too, is another useful attribute that can be attached to photos through a process called geotagging. Geotagging can be used both to look for photos whose location you know and to figure out what exactly is in a photo you already have at hand.
Today, geotagging is generally a laborious manual task that requires geographic data to be merged with photos after the fact using a computer. But more power-efficient approaches will lead to in-camera GPS systems that will enable automatic geotagging, predicted Kanwar Chadha, founder of GPS chip designer SiRF Technology.
"A location stamp is much more important than a time stamp in most cases. A year down the road, you have no idea where those pictures were taken and no way to search for location," Chadha said.
Face recognition is an area of active research and some commercialization. Start-up Riya is working on technology to search through online photo albums to try to identify individuals. Polar Rose is trying to improve recognition by generating 3D models of faces. And 3VR wants to apply face recognition to what's become a highly lucrative market, security.
Software from University of California-San Diego researchers, shown here at the 6sight digital imaging conference, can identify facial expressions. This shot shows the nose-wrinkling detector in action, which Marian Stewart Bartlett believes could be useful for market researchers.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)At the 6sight conference, Marian Stewart Bartlett showed results of her research into not just face detection, but expression detection. Her work at the Machine Perception Lab at the University of California-San Diego lets a computer monitor 30 of the 46 codified components of facial expressions. That includes movements such as raised eyebrows and wrinkled noses.
In the demonstration, software tracked Stewart's face from a video camera and recorded expression parameters. Analyzing the data, the computer can draw conclusions about people. For example, when comparing a video of a man's face as he experienced actual pain from immersing his hand in cold water to another in which he faked the pain, people had about an even chance guessing which showed the authentic pain. The computer, though, had 72 percent accuracy, she said.
That level of sophistication is beyond a camera's abilities today, requiring a full-fledged computer run by people with Ph.D. degrees. But particularly given that Sony already has introduced a camera with smile detection, it's not hard to imagine a day when your photos could also some day be tagged "delighted" or "disgusted," too.
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