The Future of the Photo Search
posted by Daniel Solove
From the AP:
A Swedish startup is combining software and humans to help make photos and other images more easily searchable online, raising privacy concerns as the technology eases the tracking of people across Web sites. . . .
Polar Rose AB is bringing facial-recognition technology to the mix. Its software scans everyday images for about 90 different attributes. If the software finds a match with images in a database, it concludes the two photos are of the same person.
The company, among many startups seeking to improve image search, believes its technology is noteworthy because it creates 3-D renditions of faces in images, allowing the computer to account for slight variations in angles and lighting.
Nikolaj Nyholm, the company’s chief executive, said testing has shown up to 95 percent reliability with sets of 10,000 photos. But he said that as the collection grows — there are millions, perhaps billions, of photographs on the Internet — reliability diminishes because, well, many people simply look alike.
That’s where humans come in. In early 2007, the company will distribute free plug-ins for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox browsers. People who post or view photos could add information such as names; there might be the occasional error, but enough people filling in the correct answer would make that rise to the top.
The idea is to label every face, even ones in the background, whether posted on a Web journal, a photo-sharing site like Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO – news)’s Flickr or a social-networking hangout like News Corp.’s MySpace. The service won’t index images on personal computers or password-protected sites.
The company is called Polar Rose, and it claims that it “relies on a combination of our unique face recognition algorithms and the collective intelligence of our users.” If this works as intended, this new photo search could pose a privacy threat, as many pictures of people online are currently without captions and thus won’t pull up in a search under a person’s name. On the other hand, since it works via a wiki, people could add in bogus information to make the system less reliable. Anyway, will this new photo search really work well? How much of an impact will it have on privacy?
December 29, 2006 at 6:17 pm
Posted in: Privacy
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Responses (1)
Protecting Privacy Rights - January 10, 2007 at 11:13 am
Photos, please.
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