In the anticipated release of Google’s new and improved Picasa, the company will offer facial recognition technology to help you identify friends and family in your pictures without requiring you to tag them by-hand each time you see them.
Launching at noon PDT today, Picasa’s facial recognition technology will ask you to identify people in your pictures that you haven’t tagged yet. Once you do and start uploading more pictures, Picasa starts suggesting tags for people based on the similarity between their face in the picture and the tags you already put in place for them.
The facial recognition technology comes to Picasa thanks to an acquisition Google made in 2006 of Neven Vision, a company that specialized in matching facial detail with images already found in a centralized database. Picasa’a facial recognition technology works in much the same way.
There’s no telling if the facial recognition technology will be able to accurately identify each person in a picture, but it does suffer from a setback that may annoy users: it works best when a person is facing the camera and will have trouble identifying them if they’re not.
“Our face-matching technology works best when a person is looking at the camera,” Mike Horowitz, Google’s Picasa product manager told CNET. “There are a variety of factors that may limit our success in matching faces, including profile views and challenging lighting conditions like shadows.”
Either way, it’s nice to see Google pull Picasa out of the doldrums and breathe some life into it. To play around with the facial recognition technology, head to Google’s Picasa page later this afternoon.
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Lets hope they also release the Mac version soon!!! Come ON!
We’re launching at DEMO in a week…
Facial detection and an iPhoto like interface — http://ilovephotos.com
@dep
I agree, the only upgrade to Picasa I’m interested in is a Mac version. Face recognition? Ho-hum.
You can’t be serious not to mention any aspects of privacy here. For me, it’s a horror scenario to know that Google might recognize my face on a picture once somebody created a link between my face and my person. The feature of users picture-tagging other users on SNS is so obtrusive and out of ones control, already.
I have to agree with Alex here; there needs to be a way to globally require approval of having one’s picture tagged throughout SNS’ - and controlling one’s digital identity.
I should have control over my identity, not someone else (not even Google).
I agree with you completely. This is one of the most horrible invasions of privacy I’ve ever heard of. In most states, law enforcement are not permitted to invade a persons privacy in this manner, why should Picassa be allowed to run amuck with privacy ?
bad bad bad
Easy boy. The face recognition functionality is only avaiable in the picture of YOUR album. There’s no security concerns.
Finally a compelling reason to use Picasa instead of Flickr.
Is this talking about the online photo hosting Picasa or the download and use on my computer Picasa?
This is Picasa Web. Picasa desktop does reconize faces in pictures, but you can’t name tag them
I hear rumours that Polar rose, a Swedish company, is launching partnerships with photosharing sites with the same functionality
- John
http://info.polarrose.com/partners/
Yes. In the comming days Polar Rose will lunch partnership with one of the biggest photosharing sites. Stay tuned! There is a more interesting things to come
I bet if you have your mouth full when the camera goes off, Picasa will mistake you for your uncle Fred. It’ll be interested to see how they deal with beards, profiles, aging, talking, and all the other permutations we put our faces through. Of course, if we give them a big enough training set–the kind the NSA is wishing it had for Al Qaeda members–they could get pretty smart.
google nsa cia are all one fucking company!
Have never used Picasa but I guess I have more reasons now…
With a TinEye-like face search it could spark a boom on self-employment.
Hmm, another reason I can’t wait for Noon PDT today…. Google, you’re killing me here!
I wonder if Google bothered to fix the thousand bugs and shortcomings in Picasa in addition to bolting on another feature. Picasa is so nice in many ways it’s a shame that it’s in the Google void.
Riya.com has been doing this for years now. for free also.
I also heard that Microsoft Live Photo Gallery (a pretty good Picasa knock-off) is about to come out with it this month too.
Someone has to come up with a new word that is the perfect combination of Cool and Creepy. Because, that’s what this is.
This is great but there are a bunch of other fundementals that Google needs to addin or fix for Picasa.
Does today’s release fix anything else?
Big Brother is watching you!
ya Big company
It didn’t release at noon
But Chrome did! yay!
Ohhh. Looks like there is tagging in Picasaweb. Maybe that’s what they meant.
Yeah, I didn’t find that terribly clear either.
I’m still waiting the OSX version…
Although for the Koreans, looking for a person using the face recognition technology is not so remote. Visit and upload an image with a face.
http://phobos.applieddevice.com/facedb/fs.php
I have to tell that the face recognition is AMAZING and usefull! It recognized my face bald, with lots of hair, dark conditions, bearded, with/without glasses, blured, smiling, open mouth, etc.
Of course its not perfect, a lot false negatives and positives. But it sure can speed your cataloging work. A wish it had a better integration with my Gmail contacts, but thats a minor problem.
This is just the beginning of invasion of privacy. The face recognition technology will improve. Google will write algorithms that will link peoples faces to email accounts, personal information and the like. Then finally, the government could go to Google and say hey where is this person? Oh, here’s his email, the web sites he goes too, the people he communicates with, and his IP Address. Contact his ISP for the address.
WOW! That must be good! No more WANTED posters on police departments! Just go to Google and get the bastard!
You don’t even need to contact the isp for the address.
But will it work with identical twins.
I’ve been playing around with the facial recognition online and the whole system kind of sucks. It runs slow and it isn’t intuitive at all. Try again.
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Hey can somebody tell me whether face recognition tech has been included in picasa. I downloaded picasa for Mac today but am not able to see any such thing.
Dear Mayank,
Face recognition is included in Web Albums only, not in the downloaded version.
If you want face recognition software to organize your photos download iLovePhotos from the following link.
http://mac.softpedia.com/get/G.....otos.shtml