Innovation in face recognition

Google have today released a new version of the free photo editing system picasa which has a couple of curious and innovative features.  Of particular note is the ability to tag people in photographs.  Tagging has become the norm for people across social networks, bulletin boards, and file sharing sites to loosely categorise their content.  What Google have done is that they have introduced the same face detection technology which they have been providing with their web product into their desktop product picasa.

When you begin using this version of picasa, the system checks your photographs for faces and then as you click on images it shows you faces which it has detected i.e. people.  You then type the person’s name and some other details and the image is thus tagged with the persons identity.  It is really simple to do.

A little bit of magic then appears to work in the background.  In your new ‘people list’ in picasa you may notice a ‘?’ icon.  When you now click on the person it brings back the images which you have tagged as the person but also suggests other ‘finds’ that the computer has taken a guess at being the same person across your photographic library.  This is very innovative and clever use of technology.

You can read more about it, over on the google blog or watch the introductory youtube video below.