Picasa Recognizes You

By Craig Agranoff September 2nd, 2008

Picasa, should be announcing right about now that they are lauching a new facial recognition software with their latest update today. Other features are also rumored to be launched, including a way to make movies from your photos, photo retouching and synchronization with your web album.

The new tag feature will display a group of photos that they deem to be the same person. The person can then attach a name to the photo, and once they do, that user can see the photos of the tagged person throughout their albums. Then, picasa will link the images it deems to have the same person in. It is like tagging each photo, but without having to do all the work.

Google isn’t the first to toy around with facial recognition. Other companies like BetaFace have offered it. Google purchased the technology back in ‘06 from Neven Vision. The verdict is still out on whether or not facial recognition in photos will work. Should it work properly, its uses could be widespread on the web, for dating sites, social networks etc. The problem with facial recognition comes when the photo isn’t straight on. Let’s hope google can solve this.

D Sharma

Hi Craig,

Actually apart from initiatives by Google and BetaFace there is lot of development that has taken place in this space. While there's a lot of buzz about Picasa's face-recognition going on, I'd also like to share with you the face-recognition capabilities of 'Family Social Networking' site MyHeritage.

It is kinda cool in the sense that all the photos of the family members are online and they fully integrate with the family tree. Apart from that, the beauty is that it works with several world-wide language.

Craig, I'd request you or perhaps Sid to take a look at 'face-recognition' by MyHeritage sometime and let us know your thoughts about it.

Would be glad to hear your thoughts about it !

Craig (lapp)

Will try to get to it soon!

Italian Restaurant

Wow this is cool. I think facial recognition makes things easier and protect our privacy. This is great ! Thanks for introducing it to me. Hope to get it soon too.

Singapore Escorts

Great technology but I guess it will require a lot of fine-tuning to make foolproof. Anyway, its a great step forward.

Eliseo

A great thing, this new facial recognition. I see that it opens new possibilities and discoveries.

Southern California Coast

Widespread = scary. Think about the state of Florida (and others) that make the drivers license photo database available to the public. Think about the college junior at the wet T-shirt contest during spring break. Think much worse. All those faces (and more) get names addresses, facebook , myspace (and after college - LinkedIn) tags. Would take massive computing power but lets all hope we never get there.

If we do the solution will just be simple distortion. Move the ear 1mm off center and the software will have a much harder time. The viewer will probably not notice, especially if we are talking about the kind of pictures where the ear is not the main focus.

Finlay

Such an abundance of proposal that is looking totally seducing especially this feature about making movies from one’s photos. I saw many other programs of this sort but it was looking mostly like a photo stream or a slide show, so the real movie format is exactly what I am looking for!

n3th4wk

This is great. I'm looking forward to see more updates.

rohitk

Hi,
Google is really an innovative company(I will say in business,they know what and how to business in the internet).This facial recognition will capture the market very soon...(I hope so)