Face Recognition...
darryl
Registered Users Posts: 997 Major grins
Originally posted here... http://www.darryl.com/permalink.php?blurb=face. Appreciate your thoughts.
I'm currently obsessed with face recognition because I've always thought tagging was way too much work. But letting a computer do it for me with a bit of training? That's both incredibly geeky and lazy!
iPhoto '09 does it but you're stuck with the face data all being in iPhoto. The underlying database is sqlite though, so there's a possibility of hacking the tags from there and either embedding them in the JPEGs as IPTC Keywords or now I'm looking at XMP. (Wait, can you do sidecar files for JPEGs? I'm too lazy and cheap to shoot RAW.)
Oh, there's face recognition in Picasa Web Albums, but alas, that data is not currently accessible via the API, even though plenty of people want it.
Recently I found a new site called Polar Rose that will import your Flickr photos, let you tag them (ideally with your Facebook contacts), and if the tagged parties join Polar Rose and consent (guuuuh, darned viral marketing), those names will get pushed back to Flickr as notes (guh, X-Y coordinates are cute, but IMHO, unnecessary. Just give me the names, please.) So... there's a lot of things that have to happen before your tags show up. Friends tagged must 1) have Facebook accounts 2) join Polar Rose, 3) consent to your tagging them. So uh, tagging your kids? Not going to work unless you're comfortable with your 5-year old having a Facebook account. Apparently Polar Rose is also flirted with Glowfoto.com, Jalbum.net, 23hq.com and Gallery but of course (duh) the big target would be Facebook with their ginormous userbase but there's some issue with a FB policy prohibiting storing their data for more than 24 hours.
Finally, a company called Face.com announced a FB app called Photo Finder that purportedly lets you run facial recognition across your FB galleries. It's still in alpha though, and frankly, I think facial recognition for Facebook is largely superfluous because 1) people are much more selective about what they upload to FB, so they are more likely to tag the photos right after uploading, 2) FB has made the tagging interface so easy, that it's almost hard not to tag, 3) FB has made tagging collaborative by letting your friends tag themselves and others.
Bottom line: Facebook photos usually get tagged by you and your friends -- you don't need a computer to do that work for you. What you need is for a computer to go through the piles of photos in your hard drive and tag all the old photos of your family/friends from the last 5 years so that you can post the embarrassing ones to Facebook.
Speaking of which, yet another reason Facebook sucks -- it ignores existing IPTC Captions or Keywords when uploading.
I'm currently obsessed with face recognition because I've always thought tagging was way too much work. But letting a computer do it for me with a bit of training? That's both incredibly geeky and lazy!
iPhoto '09 does it but you're stuck with the face data all being in iPhoto. The underlying database is sqlite though, so there's a possibility of hacking the tags from there and either embedding them in the JPEGs as IPTC Keywords or now I'm looking at XMP. (Wait, can you do sidecar files for JPEGs? I'm too lazy and cheap to shoot RAW.)
Oh, there's face recognition in Picasa Web Albums, but alas, that data is not currently accessible via the API, even though plenty of people want it.
Recently I found a new site called Polar Rose that will import your Flickr photos, let you tag them (ideally with your Facebook contacts), and if the tagged parties join Polar Rose and consent (guuuuh, darned viral marketing), those names will get pushed back to Flickr as notes (guh, X-Y coordinates are cute, but IMHO, unnecessary. Just give me the names, please.) So... there's a lot of things that have to happen before your tags show up. Friends tagged must 1) have Facebook accounts 2) join Polar Rose, 3) consent to your tagging them. So uh, tagging your kids? Not going to work unless you're comfortable with your 5-year old having a Facebook account. Apparently Polar Rose is also flirted with Glowfoto.com, Jalbum.net, 23hq.com and Gallery but of course (duh) the big target would be Facebook with their ginormous userbase but there's some issue with a FB policy prohibiting storing their data for more than 24 hours.
Finally, a company called Face.com announced a FB app called Photo Finder that purportedly lets you run facial recognition across your FB galleries. It's still in alpha though, and frankly, I think facial recognition for Facebook is largely superfluous because 1) people are much more selective about what they upload to FB, so they are more likely to tag the photos right after uploading, 2) FB has made the tagging interface so easy, that it's almost hard not to tag, 3) FB has made tagging collaborative by letting your friends tag themselves and others.
Bottom line: Facebook photos usually get tagged by you and your friends -- you don't need a computer to do that work for you. What you need is for a computer to go through the piles of photos in your hard drive and tag all the old photos of your family/friends from the last 5 years so that you can post the embarrassing ones to Facebook.
Speaking of which, yet another reason Facebook sucks -- it ignores existing IPTC Captions or Keywords when uploading.
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Comments
And yeah, for as solcially intersting as some of their stuff is, Facebook is surprisingly lame in the way they handle stuff like photos. Then again, so many online sites do such a pathetic job at reading info from the files themselves. I'm a firm believer in all, or as much as possible, of the info about a picture being in the actual file's meta info, not stored in an application database or online system. The info needs to travel with the source photo asset and not be tied to any application or site.
My 2 cents, anyway...
Unfortunately adding keywords using SmugMug's UI has proven to be [thread=131148]increasingly[/thread] [thread=129518]painful[/thread].
I've got parents in my son's pre-school class trying to help add keywords for kids' names for thousands of photos. They're perfectly willing to do so, but the unreliable interface (where changes are sometimes immediately updated, and other times not) makes them very unhappy and reluctant to do it.
I considered writing my own UI that is more Facebook/Flickrish, but if the backend is still flaky about displaying updated changes, then it wouldn't really help. :-{
I'm actually doing some work related to file metadata at the moment, i'd be interested in seeing how WLPG stores the info in xmp. Can you please email me a file to david at smugmug or point me to a file on SmugMug that I can download and look at.
Cheers,
David
SmugMug API Developer
My Photos
Darryl,
XMP can exist in your JPGs without a sidecar file, if you use tools like LR, you will find that they embed XMP data along with IPTC when you export photos.
Cheers,
David
SmugMug API Developer
My Photos