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April 16, 2008

Chinese Photo Site Tuyuan May Do Facial Recognition. Or It May Just Put Boxes Around People’s Heads

Michael Arrington

32 comments »

I can’t really say much about Tuyuan yet since it’s in Chinese and there isn’t much information (translated page here), but it certainly looks like they’re trying to tackle the facial recognition problem that has destroyed many a startup.

We’ve seen Riya (now focused on ecommerce via Like.com), Ookles (never launched), and Polar Rose (in private beta for nearly a year), among others. Most recently Tagcow came on the scene, but it turns out it uses humans to tag photos, which tends to produce bad data.

Will Tuyuan be any different? We have no idea yet. But we’re contacting them to find out. More soon. Thanks for the tip, Orli.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 1:06 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. 113.com

    April 16th, 2008 at 1:12 am

    Tuyuan’s AboutUs page translated by Google –
    http://www.google.com/translat.....angpair=zh|en&hl=en&ie=UTF8

    Interesting service… :-o

  2. Kai

    April 16th, 2008 at 1:13 am

    According to what I can read from the website (I can read some Chinese), the website claims to automatically recognize people in the photos, and after “naming” the people, any new photos with the same person will automatically be tagged.

    Sounds like riya.

  3. patoh

    April 16th, 2008 at 1:14 am

    Such a thing wouldn’t be hard for most photo’s on myspace, just put a box around the middle of the photo and you have all the heads ;)

  4. Michael Arrington

    April 16th, 2008 at 1:15 am

    if anyone can get into the beta, please provide a full report. :-)

  5. 113.com

    April 16th, 2008 at 1:17 am

    According to google translation of their about-us page, it’s a “geopolitical map” LOL… :-)

  6. Robin Wauters

    April 16th, 2008 at 1:17 am

    Don’t forget Viewdle, who recently won the Plugg award for best start-up, they specialize in facial recognition, although they admittedly focus on video rather than images.

    Their technology is very interesting, if only for the fact it is built around an old technology used by the KGB.

    http://www.zoomz.nl/archief/pl.....y-viewdle/

  7. Knowledge is power

    April 16th, 2008 at 1:21 am

    Face detection can be performed very well with modern computer vision algorithms. Face recognition is a much harder problem but good algorithms that work for small data sets are available. From Kai’s comment it sounds like they are performing recognition within a small set of people so it is possible that they have a good solution. What I am not so sure of is whether this is really useful to anyone!

  8. yongfook

    April 16th, 2008 at 1:22 am

    was my comment just deleted?? Don’t take it personally, Mike, I just think you could have waited for their response before posting this article (which basically has no content other than “I wonder what this does”).

  9. 113.com

    April 16th, 2008 at 1:24 am

    According to tuyuan, it just take a few uploaded photos of the same person for the algorithm to work… seems fun..

  10. ilmay

    April 16th, 2008 at 2:08 am

    This is their blog, more information. http://blog.tuyuan.com

  11. Yuancheng

    April 16th, 2008 at 2:08 am

    I’m a native Chinese and one of Tuyuan.com’s beta testers. Tuyuan does use face detection technology to help tag people in photo and performs awesome!
    For English speeking people, u can check out an example based on hundreds pics from the TV-show Friends. (photos of Monica detected automatically by Tuyuan: http://www.tuyuan.com/photolis.....mp;uid=970)

    U need invitation to join tuyuan. Just submit ur email address and get surprised. LOL

  12. mayaintimates

    April 16th, 2008 at 3:13 am

    Facebook should also add such facial recognition boxes. :)

  13. Amanjit Gill

    April 16th, 2008 at 4:04 am

    startups != science.

    Anyone with a university degree in cs, math or physics and appropriate coding skills can solve that problem.

    As soon as startups are based on competence, and not greed they might even succeed at that.

  14. hyokon

    April 16th, 2008 at 4:17 am

    There is Olaworks in Korea. They had similar issues that most in this area have, that is “where do we apply the technology?”. When I talked to the CEO in this February, they were working with ecommerce and news sites. Gradually they seem to be figuring it out.

    http://www.olaworks.com/

  15. Ghaus

    April 16th, 2008 at 4:40 am

    The “About” page is bloody funny !!! lol

  16. natadd

    April 16th, 2008 at 8:35 am

    Does’t http://mugr.com/ do all this kind of stuff with face recognition? Any infos on that?

  17. chris

    April 16th, 2008 at 9:01 am

    http://www.seekpai.com
    there is another website providing similar function.

  18. GeekyCoder

    April 16th, 2008 at 9:49 am

    My analysis tell me they are using human more than automated technology if they ever exist in first place.

    Why ? Just take a look at the box that highlight the head ?
    Anyone notice that it is inconsistent ? Why some box touch the head, and some leave a noticeable distance given that the background is homogeneous ? Only a human could produce such inconsistency. A automated system tend to be more consistent and accurate.

    Well, just my opinion, I could be wrong but then human judgement is inconsistent, isn’t it ? <:^]

  19. meditic

    April 16th, 2008 at 10:11 am

    Michael, you are deceived by the page shot.
    i’m pretty sure this site (TuYuan) has nothing to do about face recognition.
    It’s kind of a mixture of flickr and facebook sns.
    btw: I’m native chinese.

  20. Andy Wei

    April 16th, 2008 at 11:25 am

    From their official blog:

    Tuyuan help in English. Part 1: From Sign Up to Upload
    http://blog.tuyuan.com/archives/25

    Tuyuan help in English. part 2: Facial recognition
    http://blog.tuyuan.com/archives/26

    btw, mugr appears to do something quite different, and seekpai stopped their effort on facial recognition a while ago.

  21. Calvin

    April 16th, 2008 at 11:50 am

    looks like they have a blog http://blog.tuyuan.com/. They have some translation there.

  22. Ruslan

    April 16th, 2008 at 5:13 pm

    With population China has it could be even cheaper to use humans than to use Amazon Mechanical Turk :)

  23. Tuyuan

    April 16th, 2008 at 8:23 pm

    Hi, Michael,

    Seems like you haven’t got my emails. I sent you two emails and one invitation. If none of them reaches you, please let me know and I will figure something out.

    To make some clarification, we find faces on photos, we also try to figure out who is who (facial recognition), and we don’t use human power.

    For others who are interested in the service, please read our help series (3 posts by now) in English at http://blog.tuyuan.com. If you think you can still handle the language, please apply on Tuyuan homepage and we will send you the invitation soon.

  24. '

    April 16th, 2008 at 10:32 pm

    According to the homepage screen shot, it looks like they only differentiate between foreigners & asians. =)

  25. Alexander

    April 17th, 2008 at 6:03 am

    Automatically recognize people in the photos is possible. If you need the engine for your project just contact us http://www.Luxand.com

  26. Math2Gold

    April 17th, 2008 at 8:02 am

    woo~I’m a user of tuyuan.

    flying by,flying by~

  27. MEMSNerd

    April 23rd, 2008 at 8:24 am

    I think I found the hidden link to their registration page, hopefully they will open the registration to the public soon. Try it yourself.

    http://deploy.tuyuan.com/reg?a=reg

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