Is this Peter?

My copy of iPhoto ‘09 arrived this week, and I sat down this morning to take its new facial recognition features, branded Faces, out for a ride. While it’s not perfect, it’s pretty good. You train it for a while — not too long, as it turns out — and then it starts to be able to guess at the identity of faces on its own:

iPhoto '09 Faces Feature

Some observations after an hour of work:

  • So far it’s been unable to identify Oliver in any photos, perhaps because he’s growing so fast so he looks different in every photo.
  • My father has proved the easiest to consistently identify: he has a distinctive beard, so this isn’t surprising, and I can imagine the only way iPhoto would get confused is if I threw a lot of David Suzuki pictures into the mix.
  • I have twin brothers. This is problematic.

See also Polar Rose if this sort of thing interests you.

Comments

Steven Garrity's picture
Steven Garrity on February 1, 2009 - 16:14 Permalink

The web version of Picassa has this kind of functionality and it’s impressive. It’s even able to identify most of the photos of my daughter, who is only six-months old (and hence changing a lot from week to week).

Ann Thurlow's picture
Ann Thurlow on February 1, 2009 - 22:52 Permalink

Steven:
That’s because your daughter is unusually beautiful.

Andrew Chisholm's picture
Andrew Chisholm on February 1, 2009 - 22:59 Permalink

I have also been using Google’s Picassa Web for a little while now. I was skeptical at first but I was impressed within my first five minutes of testing it out. Face recognition detection in consumer products is almost perfect, kind of makes me wonder how well the technology “they” have is.