Riya to become a full visual search engine

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

AOL Testing Facial Recognition Image Organizer for Your Photos

I haven't read anything else about this, but AOL has a prototype of a facial recognition image organizer available for download at their beta site, AOL Greenhouse. It has a fairly poor interface, so once you start to tag your photos going back and viewing them is, say, not even close to as easy as with Picasa. Still, it does identify faces in pictures pretty well, groups similar faces, and is fairly intelligent in tagging people once you've begun training it. In early testing, it seems to be more accurate than Riya, but isn't even as usable as Riya's web interface.



The problem with this, of course, and the problem with Riya, Flickr, Picasa, etc, is that they all have their good and their bad, but none of them are as strong as I want them to be. Picasa is necessary for managing a full collection of photos on your desktop, but Picasa Web Albums is limited in storage and usability, so I need to have Flickr on the web. Flickr is a step behind in web functions, though, and could definitely benefit from the addition of some AI such as facial recognition.



So now I have photos in Picasa, in AOL Image Organizer, on Flickr, on Riya, on Picasa Web Albums, and a few scattered on things like Zooomer. What I really want is the ability to share information from site to site - share geotagging, facial tagging, descriptions, etc, and important/sync the data across the storage / community sites. It simply takes too much work to manage a large collection of pictures at this point, and no one property is strong enough to handle all of my wants.



So is anyone else writing about AOL Image Organizer? Is anything out there going to tackle these problems?

Technorati Tags: zooomr, flickr, riya, picasa, webalbums, picasa web albums, google web albums, aol, aol image organizer, facial recognition, photo storage, photo organization, geotagging

Riya - Please sell your facial recognition technology to someone who will use it

Riya, the photo-sharing website with facial recognition capability that I've obsessed over and written often about, is looking to sell their facial recognition technology. They transitioned over all of their efforts to a visual shopping search engine which is apparently very lucrative for them, although not nearly as exciting or fun. Apparently they never got over the hump in making the facial recognition software as accurate as they wanted, and any talks with buyers of Riya in that incarnation died long ago. Now they will officially rename their company Like.com, and sell off the Riya technology. I am hoping that Google or Yahoo purchases them and implements the technology immediately into Picasa or Flickr respectively - it would be an invaluable asset in tagging the thousands of photos I now have in each service (my wish list also includes those two companies allowing inter-operability & sync'ing). But now I'm thinking more likely someone like Facebook buys the technology and uses it to help its users tags the faces of their friends, a practice that Facebook users are already doing and are used to, and probably wouldn't mind the help.

Google buys photo recognition software for Picassa

I skipped over this when it first happened, but since it effects my love affair with Riya, I want to come back to it. Google purchased a company called Neven Vision, a company which focuses on "automatically extracting information from a photo...it could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects." Basically this means that the great things about Riya - facial recognition in particular - could be rolled out into Picasa relatively soon. The big peave with photo applications is that they don't share information; I tag photos on Flickr and I let Riya do it for me, but Picasa falls by the wayside, though its a powerful and capable desktop photo organization tool. If it gains the ability to intelligently tag, and Google improves on its Picasa direct to web albums, this could be a really strong offering that ultimately trumps Flickr. At least for me, I like having photos on both my home computer and the web, and if Picasa's the only option to share information between those two platforms, it does it well, and it assists me in tagging, that becomes very convincing.

Related Tags: flickr, riya, nevenvision, facialrecognition, photorecognition, picasa, google, desktop, photo, sharing

Riya getting a makeover, almost ready to search the visual web

Riya, the facial recognition photo site that i've spoken about several times, is in the process of turning itself from a specialized photo storage site into a full visual search engine that intends to be able to take an image and look for all similarities throughout the web.  The founders are slowly rolling out the new Riya by scalling back what information is shown on your personal pages right away and simplifiyin the homepage to look entirely like a search engine.  Now with a very Googlle-esque simplicity, they expect to bring to the table "search by color", "search by cameraphone", "search by similar image", and "search by sketch."

technorati tags:riya, facialrecognition, cameraphone, search, google, color, sketch, storage, sharing, flickr

Image Recognition Ads Come to Facebook

I know this seems kind of creepy, but I can't help be incredibly impressed by this: Like.com, which formerly used to be Riya.com, the facial recognition photo sharing service that I was obsessed with, but then changed over to an object recognition shopping site (show us an item that a celebrity is wearing and we'll show you 50 things just like it ranging in all types of prices), is now running ads on Facebook that match the picture in the ad with your profile picture. TechCrunch has an example where the ad features a guy wearing aviator glasses because Riya's technology recognized aviator glasses. This is very cool, albeit a bit creepy. Note that TechCrunch is not confirming this yet, just suggesting based on the technology Riya is known for that this type of image recognition match is happening in the background - so maybe I should hold off a sec before I get too excited.

Viewdle is Facial Recognition in Videos

New video application Viewdle is actually able to pull off significant facial recognition within video.  It takes one detailed image of a person's face and then picks out when the person appears in video.  This leads to deep tagging and rich video search.  I'm not sure whether this will be available for personal use (could they offer a browser extension where this is utilized in video we've already uploaded on YouTube, Google Video, and Facebook), but it's alive and impressive on the Reuters, allowing you to search through their video archives.

Other recent articles about facial recognition in images: Riya 1,2 (my favorite), Google, AOL

Technorati Tags: facial recognition , viewdle , riya , reuters , deep tagging , video , video search

Saying Goodbye To Web Services that Died in 2008

It looks like some services I love are closing shop Today.  Yottamusic, the web service that provided a better interface for Rhapsody (most importantly it connected Last.FM to Rhapsody, why has Rhapsody itself not done that) has a goodbye letter up on its website.  Also as of midnight I can no longer access Riya, the photo website with facial recognition that I was such a fan of.  How many services that I truly liked and used will I realize have gone under as we hit the new year all over the world?

I had written the founder of Yottamusic a week ago asking about the future of the product and hadn't heard back - but he provided one-touch access to an XML file of your library and playlists if you saved music on the service, and also provided 24 hour turn around to syncing your Yottamusic library with your Rhapsody library, which is at the very least a very thoughtful and respectable addition to the service on the way out its door.

I have written the founder of Riya as well, but I've done this before and heard no response, so we'll see if it's different this time.  He is currently developing Like.com on the same technology, but for shopping, which is significantly less interesting and less valuable to me (although may be more lucrative).