Face recognition

[dhicks]

Hello All,

 

We have a large, shared file share containing photos. The idea is that everyone just shovel all the photos they take on there so they're available for later use in publicity material and so on. We have an issue with some parents, quite understandably, not wanting pictures of their children used in publicity. What's the best way to sort through photos to identify particular people? Just how well does the current crop of desktop photo management software work? I know everyone was ooh-ing and aaah-ing a few months ago over Picasa being able to recognise people's faces - is Picasa useable in any way on a shared file area? I know it didn't used to be, it created index / modification files that would get written over / locked by multiple users - has it changed at all? Just how good is its face recognition - if we give it the standard mug-shot pictures of all the pupils they have done at the start of term, will it reliably pick up all that pupil's pictures from there on?

 

Are there any other alternatives? Is there a library available that will allow me to write a script to do face recognition? Does Picasa have any kind of API that will let me see how it has organised or tagged files so I can see what it's tagged images with?

 

--

David Hicks

[soveryapt]

Buy a Mac with iLife '09 and iPhoto will do Face Recognition for you. It takes a while for it to learn and occassionally get's things wrong, but that might be a start ..

 

I guess there are probably other solutions out there too, but the Face Detection in iPhoto is pretty amazing!

[plexer]

Looking at the information for Picasa I'm not sure if you can tell it to go and find everyone who looks like this picture, I would think it would just match likenesses.

 

Ben

[dhicks]

Buy a Mac with iLife '09 and iPhoto will do Face Recognition for you.

 

We're looking at buying a new machine for the photo server, so a Mac server might be a good idea - maybe one of the new Mac Mini Servers with an attached Firewire-capable external RAID box? Or just have it mount an NFS share on a networked machine. Same questions apply for iPhoto as for Picasa, though: does it handle being used on a public file share, used by multiple users?

 

--

David Hicks

[soveryapt]

We're looking at buying a new machine for the photo server, so a Mac server might be a good idea - maybe one of the new Mac Mini Servers with an attached Firewire-capable external RAID box? Or just have it mount an NFS share on a networked machine. Same questions apply for iPhoto as for Picasa, though: does it handle being used on a public file share, used by multiple users?

 

--

David Hicks

 

I'll have a looksy and see .. I'm not sure how well it will handle it, but I guess you might be able to set faces it has recognised and are authorised for use to be publically accessible as albums, but someone would need to confirm if it's got the face detection right or not, but it's certainly a big help in getting them sorted.

 

EDIT: Plus, I think the MacMini Servers come with 2 disks that can be RAID1 set.. I might be wrong there though..

[dhicks]

I'm not sure how well it will handle it, but I guess you might be able to set faces it has recognised and are authorised for use to be publically accessible as albums

 

Ah, so I could give each user their own exported file share, kind of thing? Do you think it'll handle 800-odd users?

 

Plus, I think the MacMini Servers come with 2 disks that can be RAID1 set.

 

I'm aiming for a 4TB file store for the photo server. I can always attach the Mac Mini to a small switch and attach a dedicated file server to that, giving a direct gigabit connection between the mac and its file store.

 

--

David Hicks

[AngryTechnician]

We use an in-house autonomous intelligent agent for this. We call it 'a teacher with a list of kids who can't be in photos'.

 

Seriously though, I'll be very interested (and impressed) if you get this working. Even with the relatively few kids we can't use in publicity, it's a pain getting the teachers to vet their photos.

[plexer]

Some info about picasa:

 

Picasa 3.5: how to share the tagged faces from one PC to another - Super User

 

Ben

[Snarf]

Picasa does work very well and will scan all your photos for faces. Once you've entered a name it will then start to suggest other faces that it thinks match and you just say yes or no. It isn't perfect by any means, but it is free to download and use.

[Ric_]

I too have used Picasa and found it to work VERY well with hundreds of pictures (I collect a lot of pictures with doing 'Geek stuff). Picasa also works well on non-local storage!

[dhicks]

I too have used Picasa and found it to work VERY well with hundreds of pictures (I collect a lot of pictures with doing 'Geek stuff). Picasa also works well on non-local storage!

 

But that's still non-local storage that only one person uses at a time, right? This looks promising:

 

Manual - googlecl - How to use GoogleCL. - Project Hosting on Google Code

 

Picasa Web Albums offers 1GB of storage - could we sign up for an account, upload individual pictures of pupils, then upload groups of photos for Picasa to face-recognise and delete the photos from Picasa again afterwards?

 

--

David Hicks