Friday, October 28, 2005
Face/Text Recognition Digital Photo Search from Riya
Posted by Suhit Gupta in "SOFTWARE" @ 10:00 AM
"You might think what I'm about to tell you is science-fiction, but a new Internet service called Riya -- currently in Alpha stage -- claims to be able to search your digital photos and identify faces and text with its proprietary recognition software. And, not only that, it can automatically tag them with the relevant information (via TRFJ). If the service works as claimed, Riya will definitely be opening a new chapter in how we organize our digital photos."
While I was in school, I attended several talks that talked about this exact topic. The problem is that this approach has to be a heuristic one and your search is only going to be as good as your heuristics. Anyways, it is a very hard problem to solve with far too many inaccurate results traditionally returned (clearly the Department of Homeland Security is spending a LOT of money on facial recognition systems and we have all heard that it is much harder than they originally imagined). I guess we will have to see how the service actually does (site is down right now), but obviously if it does well then it would be a wonderful service.
While I was in school, I attended several talks that talked about this exact topic. The problem is that this approach has to be a heuristic one and your search is only going to be as good as your heuristics. Anyways, it is a very hard problem to solve with far too many inaccurate results traditionally returned (clearly the Department of Homeland Security is spending a LOT of money on facial recognition systems and we have all heard that it is much harder than they originally imagined). I guess we will have to see how the service actually does (site is down right now), but obviously if it does well then it would be a wonderful service.
