2 Years Post Neven Deal...Google Launches Face Rec

Via TechCrunch:

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.

Surveillance and Mapping Software Together at Last

It seems like a lot of cities are announcing large scale facial recognition systems these days, which will definitely require an increase in data storage capabilities to store more and better footage. What I find more interesting than the storage angle in this piece, is mention of combining Microsoft’s Virtual Earth (which could just as easily be Google Earth, for that matter) with surveillance video--presumably this will/could be used to map in real time the location of bad guys and dispatch law enforcement as appropriate. It’s an interesting approach and no doubt going to be much more useful than the giant video walls normally deployed.

Chicago to Add Cameras to Street Sweepers

For those of you who were worried about privacy implications of “Google’s Street View,” Chicago is about to do them one better:

“We already know we're under surveillance ... well, pretty much all the
time. But it looks like the City may be adding some more robot overlords in
the near future: City Hall is looking for companies to provide high-res
cameras to be attached to street sweepers to photograph illegally parked
cars. The cameras would capture a pic of your license plate, and you'd get a
ticket in the mail. Most street sweeping tickets are $50.”

I am not sure MORE parking tickets were what folks had in mind when they stood up for more city surveillance.

Search Engines Using Facial Recognition

Search engines adopting face recognition now include Google, Microsoft Live, Exalead.
Blog, Search Engines are getting better as everyday passes by, and we see new features added to give users the best experience and satisfaction ever. Face Recognition is a technology that has been adapted by search engines like Google, Live Search and Exalead in a move to tune up their image search results. Now you could restrict image searches to only human faces, rather than getting more of irrelevant images. (Via Nitesh Gautam’s Blog)