A great example of the state of the art comes from a new company called Riya, which recently launched a beta facial-recognition service for the masses. The service builds on current multimedia search techniques. With billions of bits of information out there, finding what you want is impossible without good search tools, and there hasn’t been a really good way to search multimedia files like photos, video and sound.
A common current practice, used by photo sites like Flickr, is to encourage users to tag photos, and then allow text searches of those tags. Riya also relies on meta tags, but uses facial-recognition software to create them automatically. Subscribers upload photos, and then tell the Riya software who the person is. By repeatedly running the recognition algorithm against multiple photos of the same person, Riya software eventually learns to identify other images of the same face. Once trained, the software will automatically generate meta tags, and users can search their own photos and the photos of other subscribers.
The service currently only searches photos uploaded to its servers. The technology could, however, be deployed across the internet, allowing people to search the web, Flickr, Tribe and Friendster photo sets, regardless of whether the owner or the person photographed wants to be identified. That’s where things get interesting.
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