A few days ago, a new site called Riya lauched. Riya is a photo site, much like Flickr, however Riya does something pretty interesting - It searches through your images for "faces", and then attempts to recognize those faces and tag them accordingly. I think it's truly a fascinating idea.
I've had a similar idea in mind for some time now, ever since seeing Flickr's "notes" capability. Basically, you can add "notes" to various parts of a picture, and label them accordingly. Check out this picture of me demonstrating this feature. It occured to me that a wonderful use for this feature would be to identify persons in the picture. Then, what if you could do a search based on that picture?!?! So for instance, if I were looking at a picture of me, my face would be tagged, and clicking on that face would present a list of all of the pictures on the site that I'm in. Truly useful, especially on a site like mine, where the majority of pictures have people in them, and represent a relatively small grouping of people.
In essence, this is what Riya is trying to accomplish. They however, are trying to take it one step further, and are automagically identifying people in your photos, after you have adequately trained it. I must say, the technology is nothing short of impressive. I signed up for the beta (which you can do here), and started uploading photos. Their client-side application does all of the analysis, identifying each of the faces in the photos I selected. I then had to log into the web application and "train" the system, assigning a name to each of the faces.
Here, for example, is a picture of Eric and his girlfriend. Each have been identified, and clicking on either will present you with a list of all of the photos that they are in. Perfect.
Riya however, falls short in a number of areas. First and foremost, the technology is far from perfect. This obviously, is something that will only get better with time, and that's not to say that's it's really quite impressive now. Secondly, the site feels clucky and complex to me. There's all kinds of different ways to slice and dice the information - Time, place, person, tags, etc. Bleh... Flickr does most all of these things already, and frankly, they're just not of any interest to me. Personally, I care about the core technology behind Riya - Tagging Faces.
I've started implementing a system like this for my own site, and you should expect to see it up and running within the next couple of days. (It's amazing how not having a job enables me to get sooooo much more development done).
More details to come...