Riya, the photo sharing site that has made a name for itself by devising advanced facial recognition software that includes taking into account the timing of photographs, georgraphy, etc, has revised their plans. The Riya team is now targeting to become a visual search enging that would search for similar images to what is being entered into their engine. For example, if you point it to a picture of a camera, Riya would be able to find everywhere on the web that has a picture of that camera. Or, in a somewhat touchy subject, Riya suggested that it could be used to find person in internet dating services that look like a person you're interested (just one example of many).
While this is all interesting, what I'm really looking for is a way to utilize the information in Riya to help me label photos on my desktop, or even Flickr. A partnership with Google that brought Riya technology to Picasa would be incredibly helpful in managing the thousands of photos we take yearly, as I will likely never fully port my photos to social photography sites, and still prefer to manage the entire colleciton on my personal computer.
Technorati Tags: Riya, facial recognition, artificial intelligence, visual search, search, google, flickr, picasa
