Unrecognized

Finally got the uploader to work today, and uploaded about twenty more photos.  I wanted to test the system a bit, so I uploaded ten pictures of people that I’d already tagged and identified and ten pictures of people who were unknown.  I ended up with eleven pictures of people that Riya identified somehow, so I went in to check and see who had been mis-tagged.  Sure enough, a picture of my girlfriend’s sister had been tagged with my girlfriend’s name.  Does this mean that Riya will have a tough time telling the difference between family members?  I doubt it — I put up bunches of pictures of myself and my sisters and it was able to tell the difference between them every time.  This might have been a strange occurence, and a singular one at that.

Tara  has a post up asking for more ideas for the photosearch, so here’s your chance to get your voice heard!  Is there anything that YOU would personally like to see in a photosearch?  I like the idea of a location-based search, like finding all photos that were taken at a particular place I’m planning on taking a vacation to, or things like that, but it seems like Tara already has that idea nailed down.

Attention Methods

Robert Scoble has a post from November 19 detailing the TechCrunch/Riya launch party. In it, he details a conversation he had with Ojos CEO Munjal Shah. Munjal talked about the facial recognition technology that has us all salivating, but he also revealed something I did not know: that Riya also uses other characteristics to identify certain people in photographs. Scoble’s son was wearing a tie-die shirt that night, and Riya would have stored information about that shirt so that it could better recognize him in case a photo doesn’t have a clear shot of his face.

Now, I’m wondering how well this is going to work in practice. Thousands of people have tie-die shirts, so will it return all those people? I guess it would be cool to say “show me all pictures of people wearing Houston Rocket jerseys” and have Riya return that, but I’m talking more specifically about finding a single person. Do you have to drill down through a bunch of data to find who you are looking for, or does the software match up shirts and other attention details with facial characteristics to give you a closer match?

This is a question I’m hoping to answer whenever the alpha goes out.

Take the Riya tour

Riya has a service available on their website that acts as a tour guide to some of the major features of the software. It takes you through the steps of uploading, tagging, and searching photos, but the real revelation here is the revealing of the auto-tagging feature.  If you add your address book to Riya, you’ll be able to automatically find pictures of people that are in your contacts list — so long as they’ve been tagged by someone else.  This essentially means that I could upload a picture of myself, train Riya to recognize that it’s me, and then tag it with my email address.  Then if my mom or someone like that goes to Riya and uploads a picture of me, it’ll automatically tag it with my name since Riya knows that it’s already me.  Pretty crazy, huh?

I truly believe that this is a software package that will reach an even bigger audience than Flickr.  Why?  Because people who don’t use Flickr will be attracted to this because of the ease of use. I’m not saying Flickr is hard, but being able to find people via facial recognition will revolutionize the picture hosting and photo search industry simply because it’s intuitive and easy. I know people who don’t know anything about Flickr, but when I mention Riya to them and tell them what it can do, they get excited.  It’s truly the future of photo search, and Google better truly be thinking about snatching this company up before Yahoo does.