Facebook Adds Face Detection To Photos

http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/07/facebook-adds-face-detection-to-photos/

by nreece • 16 years ago

22 14 16 years ago

gkoberger• 16 years ago

It doesn't seem like it would be too hard for Facebook to implement facial recognition. It's clearly not a trivial issue, however they certainly have the data, servers and intelligence to do it right. After all, they have a list of everyone you come in contact with (as well as friends of friends), along with anywhere between a dozen and a thousand tagged pictures of each.

EDIT: In reply to the poster below me- of course, autotagging wouldn't work. I was thinking more of a "suggestions" implementation.

adi92• 16 years ago

it seems like to much of a risk, in terms of the controversies that might get raised every time the recognition software screws up.. imagine the system tagging somebody's ex girlfriend on their current partner's face, or interpreting a picture of Saddam as some random friend of the poster

jackowayed• 16 years ago

Also, there's been a lot of concerns over privacy with Facebook, and Facebook being able to "recognize you" has a pretty high creepiness factor.

schn• 16 years ago

If you read the article,

"...the system will automatically detect faces in the photos and prompt you to select the friend who’s face it is."

It seems that the software is (so far) only recognising the presence of a face, not identity.

jacksoncarter• 16 years ago

Facebook is awesome. They have some of the most brilliant minds working there. Pretty soon, they'll be able to tell whose face it is! I can't wait until they partner with restaurants and banks and other places with security cameras, so I don't have to update my location or status. They can just tell all my friends where I am and what food I ate for lunch.

c1sc0• 16 years ago

Facebook is awesome. They dare to state the obvious (privacy is dead) and don't want to miss the chance of being the first to implement technology that may seem controversial now but will seem obvious tomorrow.

detst• 16 years ago

Privacy isn't an issue of either having it or not. For most of us there is a line (that moves depending on who is on the receiving end of the information) that we don't want crossed. It's far from dead.

nreece• 16 years ago

While there's nothing significantly ground-breaking about it in today's time, but Riya sort of pioneered mainstream facial recognition back in 2005 (deadpooled in August 2009) - http://www.crunchbase.com/product/riya

eam• 16 years ago

I believe even Picasa has this feature.

petervandijck2• 16 years ago

Yes, Picasa's implementation is quite good.

Face detection isn't that hard (even 200$ cameras do it on the fly), and face recognition isn't that hard either, once you realize you're only trying to recognize faces against this particular users' friends & family, ie. a pretty small set of a few dozen faces.

apu2• 16 years ago

To clarify/be pedantic, what facebook just added was face detection -- detecting where the faces are in an image. Face recognition usually refers to figuring out who a given face is of.

Riya was one of the first sites doing detection on images, and attempting to do some recognition. One of the reasons they're deadpooled now is that recognition is a really really hard problem (that's the area I do research in). Plus, they found that it was more lucrative building product search -- hence, http://like.com

anonymousDan• 16 years ago

Hey, can I ask you a question about face recognition? So I have a similar problem, except I want to automatically determine some characteristic of a human from their face. However, I'm not sure how to go about determining a relevant set of features to use. How are the features useful for face recognition determined in state-of-the-art recognition algorithms?

petervandijck2• 16 years ago

Original post here: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=403838582130

Facebook Adds Face Detection To Photos

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