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Riya Eases Pain of Digital Image Management
Vitaly Friedman writes to tell us Wired is covering a new service that hopes to alleviate some of the woes of digital picture management using face-recognition technology. Riya, requires a bit of upfront training but thereafter it is able to identify and tag individuals in your pictures along with text recognition for street signs and the like. The service also plans to offer the ability to make your online photo albums public, private, or viewable by invitation.
Thats because its not the same thing. Facebook cannot be trained to recognize faces. You have to tag it for every picture manually. The only doofus is you.
I'll bet in actual practice they are largely the same. I read this story and the "Begging for VC funding by grossly overstating capabilities" flag in my mind was waving at full mast. Face recognition is a technology in the infantile stage, and every demo that I've ever seen has used a database with just a couple of largely distinct faces: In reality with a large group of similar faces under less than ideal scenarios, it is close to useless. I know a lot of large organizations and security shops are being sold the face rec B.S., but face recognition in practice is close to useless.
Of course in this case I'm sure you're hoping that you "train" it with a set of just a few faces, and I'm sure then it could randomly guess and (if you have 4 faces) people would be amazed if it was right 25% of the time. Saying "oh it works but isn't really that accurate---but it's alpha!" is nonsense. They either have the technology, or they don't, and if it's marginally accurate (so you're spending most of your time correcting it) then it's truly worse than nothing.
Paternity tests...god...give me a break. This story has every hallmark of a scam. It sounds like the endless "super compression" stories.