Recognising Faces

We humans do it easily – at least with people we are familiar with. But it’s a bit more tricky for computers to do it. At least, it used to be.

 

I’ve just upgraded my copy of Adobe’s Photoshop Elements to the latest version, version 4.0. While some aspects of that software irritate me beyond belief, there are some interesting features. A new feature with version 4.0 is the ability to pick out faces in your photographs. It’s surprisingly effective, even if not always 100% accurate. It also picks out the faces of cats…

 

But there’s a difference between picking out an area in a photograph and saying that "this is a face" and actually identifying the face, e.g. "this is your uncle John".

 

However, that day may not be far off. TechCrunch has news of a new software application – Riya – that promises to do just that.