Google’s Photo Face Recognition is Wow Marketing
Hollywood Newsroom is now Buzz Newsroom! Visit and bookmark our new site. Buzz is bigger and better, including sports, world news, gadgets and the entertainment news that you're used to. Same staff, just more stuff! Why Fark, Drudge and Huffington when you can Buzz!?Every now and then a bit of technology wanders onto my computer screen that makes me want to pull someone over and say, “Isn’t it amazing that you can do this?” Flying around on Google Earth was like that. And so is the new face recognition system on Google’s photo sharing site, Picasa Web Albums. (Microsoft’s PhotoSynth system, which creates 3D spaces from a stack of digital snapshots, also had a jaw-dropping demo, but its first release is too hard to use.)
As I was dutifully uploading my summer vacation photos last night, the Picasa site alerted me to this new feature, which was introduced Tuesday and lost in the noise about Google’s Chrome browser. I clicked a button that set some Google server farm looking closely at my stored photos (mainly of my two constantly preening daughters).
Just a few minutes later, it presented a cluster of photos of what the software assumed were of the same person. Indeed, they were all of my six-year-old, Daphne. I typed in her name. Then it presented another batch it thought were of Daphne. I could click to confirm. I could also uncheck some photos that were not her. It similarly offered clusters of photos of my other daughter, Clare, as well as my wife and other people who I tend to photograph.
It was hardly perfect. There were a few false identifications. More troublesome, the software wasn’t really able to cluster many of the photographs. So after a few big bunches, there were a lot of sets of one or two photos it asked about. It presented three guesses about who each group of photos represented, and it usually had the right answer. It occasionally also thought some corner of a dress or cluster of palm leaves was a face.
- from NYtimes