Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 03 September 2008 13:50
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
Google has added face recognition to its Picasa Web Albums service. Is that something to worry about, or should we just sit back and enjoy it?
For many of us, a high proportion of photos in our albums include people, and it would be really handy to be able to quickly identify all the shots that include both Uncle Jim and Cousin Paul (or whatever).
Manually tagging the photos is too much like hard work, and face recognition seems to be a problem that the IT industry has pretty much solved.
A couple of years ago, a Scandinavian company called Polar Rose had the idea of applying face recognition to photographs on the web, and allowing the results to be shared across users.
The idea was to make image search easier. To use the company's example, searching for pictures of 'Peter Jackson' is likely to return photos of multiple Peter Jacksons, as well as images that just happen to be placed close to the string "Peter Jackson".
By actually recognising faces, Polar Rose would be able to cluster photos of the same person. Great for search, and potentially useful for tagging your own photo collection.
If you identify your own face to Polar Rose, then another user will see your name when viewing a photo that you appear in. That's probably OK to the extent that it's an opt-in system.
Except that it isn't. Google seems to have done a better job in this respect - see
page two.
