The current photo organizing systems like Picasa allow people to tag their pictures to create buckets of pictures. Among the most common things you can tag a picture for is who is in the picture, me, my wife, my sister, Fido, etc. The people in pictures is a fairly limited set and it is a pain to actually manually tag the pictures so nobody does it. But if you want to reminisce about an old girlfriend or high school shenanigans with your friend DJ Dave and their pictures are scattered about in various folders then how do you quickly view by person.

By combining a facial recognition tool with a user interface to allow the computer to learn which people are in the pictures, a photo organizer plugin to a system like Picasa could quickly learn to tag each image as it arrives with the appropriate people based upon facial characteristics. Ultimately this could be expanded to handle other living things like pets. The result would make it easy later to search for all images with Fido in them or just open a virtual folder for your pets.
-- dhousman, Oct 13 2005

Fujifilm Displays Face Recognition and Detection Ability http://www.digitalc...onic-Photo-Book.htm
Pretty much what you propose - I'm sure there are others out there too. But this was the first one on google. [ixnaum, Oct 13 2005]

Quite a good idea. Now, if you can just devise an incentive that will actually make ordinary people want to fill up their computers with decades and decades of old and preciously irreplaceable photos, despite the fact that everyone knows that any informational technology devised today will be hopelessly obsolete in another ten years, then I think you've got the next BIG idea.
-- jurist, Oct 13 2005


Ideas like this make my day.
-- reensure, Oct 13 2005


Baked - see link

.. but probably not reliably - why is my brother in the same folder as that chimpanzee?
-- ixnaum, Oct 13 2005


Does the current software recognize a face that has aged? Would a 2-year-old's face be recognized as the same person when he reaches 10?
-- Cedar Park, Oct 13 2005


Would it recognize plants?
-- jellydoughnut, Oct 13 2005



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