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New algorithm finds you, even in untagged photos (kurzweilai.net)
24 points by jonbaer on Dec 25, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 17 comments


Can we go back to 1974, please? I'm not sure I like where this is going.


Agreed. Just because it can be done, doesn't mean it should. Things like this may drive more toward ephemeral sharing.


Let's start a new internet country where it's isolated from the rest of the world's internet and we can have privacy for all!


There's basically nothing stopping a guy from walking into a women's restroom or vice-versa. It just isn't done because people are taught to respect certain kinds of privacy in certain situations.


>Let's start a new internet country where it's isolated from the rest of the world's internet and we can have privacy for all!

Yeah, let's, if we want to. That's what civilization means: we're supposed to be _in control_ of technology, instead of slavingly following where each new ability takes us.


Interesting work. How is it different than this, which was published in 2012 at ACM-MM, a more respected venue than IEEE-ISM?

http://www.cmlab.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~yanying/socialrelation.htm...


and there has been work going in this area even earlier than that: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~zickler/papers/Autotag_IVW2008.... Andrew Gallagher has a number of publications in this domain: http://chenlab.ece.cornell.edu/people/Andy/publications/publ...


Says the research would be presented Dec 10th. Anyone have a link to the presentation/whitepaper/code?


And this is why I don't let anyone tag me in photos.


It would be interesting to see this as part of an app where you take a photo of someone and it sends you a feed of every photo of them it could find anywhere on the web (and any accounts it was attached to.)

And by interesting I mean creepy and probably inevitable.


It sounds like this algorithm is kinda the opposite of that.

In a third photo, you fly a kite with both parents, but only your mother is tagged. Given the strength of your “tagging” relationship with your parents, when you search for photos of your father the algorithm can return the untagged photo because of the very high likelihood he’s pictured.

So the gist is that it's inferring that a photo with your mother, a child, and another adult probably includes your father. My read of the article is that their algorithm is not doing image recognition of the father, but rather, it's inferring that a photo of your mother and two others probably includes your father due to the close relationships established between you and your mother and you and your father in other photos.


I wanted to create a website to do that, the Boston bombing was what made me think of using public images to see if I could match people. Or at the very least pick a date and a place and access the images in that area maybe see what's available via Google Maps.

And somebody made that damn robot fish too I had an idea for that back in the mid 90s :( /rant


That would incur some serious data processing expense.


Would it be significant? I think most computer vision feature descriptors can be run over multiple images in parallel.

It'd be neat to reduce the entropy of possible photos by using EXIF data (location, etc.)


Coming soon to Google Glass, no doubt.


TIL: You like the people you are in pictures with?

How is ground-breaking!!!


Yes, and computing is: "calculations with zero and one", jet propulsion is "pressure in one direction move you towards the other", a car is "a carriage without horses", etc.

When you're an idiot who only understands sky-high overviews of research, nothing is ground-breaking.




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