Smile, You’re On Everyone’s Camera http://tinyurl.com/5w2p4qb
The article is about ubiquitous facial recognition spurred by a report of a new app for police that allows facial recognition at five feet away. To be clear, many consumer still cameras, and some software, does facial detection: that is there is one or more faces in the picture. Some even recognize when people are smiling, but they do not identify the individual. Apple’s iPhoto and others try and do facial recognition but my experience to date is that it’s been very hit or miss. Apple purchased a Swedish company last year to improve it’s facial recognition technology.
Clearly others already have better technology and it has been pitched for law enforcement work for a long time. However, it’s the postproduction implications that interest me. If we can have a software tool identify all the people in our footage, at lest to the stage of identifying each instance of the individual. Reading through the article it is likely the name could be discovered or derived from Facebook or other social network or public record. At worst the person would need to be manually named only once.
For a metadata-based application each clip could be tagged with the person’s ID for as long as they’re in the shot.
We would end up with ‘bins” for each individual.
Identifying people in shots is Derived Metadata and then can be used as input into other smart algorithms to take more of the boring out of post.
There are a lot of other interesting applications and implications of this increasingly popular (and capable) technology.