Everybody loves photographs. It reminds them of the precious moments they had spent with their loved ones. Most of the users on Orkut, Facebook use album features where they can share their priceless moments with their friends. With the evolution and huge adoption of digital cameras number of photos clicked by individuals have increased exponentially. With this huge number of photographs comes the headache of organizing them. I have a collection of more than 5 GB of snaps which are still unorganized and scares me when I think of organizing them.
Google seems to have come up with a solution to this problem. Soon it is going to launch automated photo tagging feature with the help of its revolutionary face detection technique. This face detection feature will be applied on all new snaps uploaded on Orkut Albums. With this feature Orkut will be able to detect the faces in the photograph and tag them accordingly. They try to detect the faces based on various unique features like eyes, noses etc but this is not a sure shot way to identify somebody due to issues like angle, light etc. The picture is shot in different ways leading to failure in proper face detection. Even if Orkut is not able to identify a person correctly or not at all one can easily go and get him tagged in the image.
Obviously this can come pretty handy if you want to tag photos according to a person’s name but in my experience people like to tag photos more with events names and places they visited. This feature seems more “COOL” and “Ah..huh” feature rather than a feature which is extremely useful.
Where is Google going with the face detection feature?
In my opinion this feature is primarily the testing playground for Google. As we all agree that there has been exponential rise in the user generated content over the internet. Images according to diskspace and videos consist of 90% of the user generated content. But till date there is no accurate search feature for that content and most search engines only rely on some tags associated with the images/videos. Google may want to be a pioneer in this domain and grab more users by providing these advanced search capabilities. Just think how cool would it be to search for “Solar Eclipse Images” returning even those hidden images/videos which are not even labeled “Solar Eclipse” but are searched by intelligent image/video detection feature. Google may be working on fine tuning the face detection algorithm based on users inputs thus innovating the next real feature.
