Sent to you by Sean McBride via Google Reader: New Face Recognition Search Engine Luxand via Alt Search Engines by Charles Knight on 11/7/08 Luxand just announced the availability of Luxand Face SDK 1.7, a unique facial-mapping engine that enables a website to find people by faces. Until recently, most searches worked by searching the text description surrounding the photo or the meta data. The engine from Luxand uses the latest face recognition technology to find all photos with the same person by the face, rather than words.
To enable the facial search, the library scans and indexes all faces found in the photographs on the website. Then when the user wants to find someone, he needs to upload a photograph with this person to the website and the engine goes to work. It analyses the uploaded photo, detects the face, extracts its feature characteristics and matches them against thousands of other photographs in the picture database. In a matter of a few seconds, the engine displays all images, in which that exact person was found. Unique to the Luxand’s engine is its outstanding matching accuracy. Unlike similar technologies, the library matches every single feature of the person’s face with its counterpart on the photographs from the database. The comparison accuracy of the algorithm has been checked in FERET tests and found to be the best in the category as compared to the face recognition implemented in competing commercial systems. In addition to the facial search, the algorithm can be used to organize a large collection of photos by automatically tagging all the pictures where it finds one and the same person. The user simply needs to upload a photo and tell who the person is in this image. Then the algorithm will find all other pictures where this individual appears and tag them automatically. Automatic tagging is a great time saver for users who share hundreds of photos online as there’ll be no need for them to spend time adding tags manually. “Our engine is an incredibly useful tool for anyone who needs to find the person but doesn’t know the name or cannot find him by textual queries,” says Alex Konoplev, CEO of Luxand. “Automatic labeling of photos using face recognition is also a great feature for the users of photo-sharing, dating or social sites like Facebook or MySpace, who demand more creative and easy ways to share and enjoy their photos with others.” Things you can do from here: - Subscribe to Alt Search Engines using Google Reader - Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites
