
Picasa introduces facial recognition to automatically tag photos of your friends - joshwa
http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2008/09/announcing-picasa-30-and-new-version-of.html
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joshwa
Looks like someone at google reads scott adams's blog, or news.yc:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216181>

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apu
It's not as if this idea was a particularly clever one -- many photo
applications allow users to tag photos, tagging photos is hard work, and so it
would be nice to have automatic tagging where the tags carry over from image
to image.

The hard part is the computer vision aspect of it. This is an incredibly
difficult problem, one into which millions of dollars were pumped in the
1990s, with not a huge amount of success. It'll be interesting to see how well
it works on Picasa.

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anamax
(1) Picasa data is almost a best case for face recognition. The "population"
for a given user is fairly small (is a new person or one of the 1-20 people
who you always take pictures of) and the images tend to be good (well lit,
lots of pixels, face-on, complete).

(2) Errors will be amusing. Folks have been saying how Aunt Emma looks like
cousin Fred for years, now we have a computer confusing them.

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apu
Why is Picasa data any better than Facebook (which can leverage the incredible
knowledge of your social network as well as user-tags to make highly educated
guesses)? or webshots (which is almost exclusively face photos)? or even
flickr? or any of the other dozens of photo sites?

