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[link] Riya - Photo search with face recognition

I've been looking for this exact product for a few years now:


Riya is a free photo search service built around facial recognition. Sure, they support searching based on who's in the picture, but they've taken it further than that by treating the faces as people with identities and e-mail addresses. If I upload a picture of you, it'll show up in your searches[1]. That's cool!

This looks like social software that actually makes sense.

I've been wanting basic facial recognition in photo management software for a while. I played around with libface for a bit, but doing this thing right takes much more than a weekend hobby project. I'm glad these guys are doing it right.

Any bets on who buys these guys our for bazillions of Web 2.0 bux (W2B)?

[1] Subject to user defined permissions, of course. It looks like the linkage is at the e-mail level rather than at the facial level, which would be kind of creepy.

8 Comments

  • Thanks Jon. That's one of the reasons we use email, it avoids some of the identity issues. Are you signed up for the alpha? If not email Tara at alpha at riya.com and she

  • i don't quite understand....spaghetti??

  • i don't quite understand....spaghetti??

  • i don't quite understand....spaghetti??

  • Does Riya have a downloadable version of this to build a database of tagged photos on a pc rather than uploading everything?

  • I was working on an extremely similar idea for this technology when I ran into the Riya site. No sense in continuing on my end. However, I'd like to see this up and running as soon as possible. So...let me say a bunch of stuff you've probably already thought of.

    As someone just questioned above, you need a local client on pc's rather than putting the burden of all of this on your server. Let the local PC create 'faceprints' of people and store those in a local database. People can organize their photos and increase the accuracy of their databases as they go. They can also mark their photos public or private.

    Next, you give people the opportunity to sychronize their database to the web. NOT the photos themselves, that's a waste of space, bandwidth and processing power. When they synchronize, your site will compare the faceprints to other uploaded faceprints and return any matches (shown on their interface simply as '5 matches for Unlce Joe' with degree of accuracy listed).

    Now, they request a download of the actual pictures if they want them. The next time the person who uploaded the matching faceprints synchronizes their database with the web, any pictures that match and which are marked as public will be uploaded (temporarily)to the Riya server.

    The pics will wait there (for, say, 30 days or less)for the requestor to sychronize again, at which time the uploaded pics will be downloaded to their client (and ultimately deleted off of the server) or then maybe the requestor can browse the matching pics and decide which ones to download.

    If the pictures are marked as private, the requestor would have the opportunity to email the owner of the pics (through Riya, not directly) and ask for release of the pics.

    Doing all this will take the burden off of your servers making your site run quicker, and at the same time this will preserve some of the anonymity of people on the web by putting a buffer (Riya) between the original owner of the pics and anyone else.

    Asking for a location of either the user or the people in the pics? Bad idea, you need to get rid of that.

    Searching by face is already a tremendous errosion of internet privacy, no need to make it worse. I'm looking forward to a mature product.

    One more thing. Make your id tags compatible (somehow) with the major picture viewers,with the tags embedded in the pics, so that any ID tags that are created will go with the pictures and show up within other viewers. Another proprietary tagging format that goes away when you go outside of the program is not needed. Make it part of the picture itself, the way time/date/type of camera is now.

  • forgot the most important point. Searching by name to bring up faces is interesting, but not nearly as interesting as being able to search by face, and bring up names.

    If I already know someone's name, I don't want to wade through thousands of photos of people with the same name to maybe find one of the actual person I'm looking for. I can get thousands of false hits right now with any random text search engine.

    What I want to be able to do, is take the photo of the person I don't know, and find a name, as well as additional photos of that same person if they are available.

  • There are few projects on codeproject.com with face detection functionality...

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