I just wastedspent the evening training the Faces feature of Aperture 3. Wow. It can’t put a name to a face automatically, but as you teach it, it’s spooky how well it does finding photos of people. I’ve been sitting here giggling at all of the photos I’d forgotten of people I care about. Great stuff.
What amazes me is how few pixels it seems to need to be able to recognize a face. It’s finding faces in group shots (of course), in crowds at hockey and football games (even if the shot is a wide angle photo with hundreds of people in it). It even finds faces in photographs pinned to the wall in the background of photos. Fun with recursion. It could also be a bit scary as a latent crowd identification system – but The Man has this stuff already…
The image of Cole above was found in this photograph of my laptop. Cole is only visible in a small iChat window. On an angle. Amazing.
You know a lot of people called Chris* 🙂
Lots of Chrises in there. Several more to come, as I work through the 20,000 or so photos. Likely even a Garrett…
20k? Yowza, you really do have the shutter bug 🙂
well, that’s 20,000 photos in a lifetime (although most are in the last few years).
James Duncan Davidson just shot over 30,000 photos during TED 2010. I know people with hundreds of thousands of photos. That boggles my mind 🙂
Sadly, my head says “If Apple can do that, I wonder what the government can do . . . .” and that is why I have so few friends.
you’ve watched CSI: Miami? they can pull DNA signatures off of reflections picked up by video cameras. amazing stuff.
Thank god I can trust all governments to do what’s right.
I upgraded as well. I feel better now that it repeatedly identified a headlight as a person and can’t tell my wife from my grandfather yet.
it also seems to be quite fond of car tires.
It’s impressive but a bit disturbing. If that’s a real screenshot, do you have permission from all of those people to post their photos on your blog? Is such a thing not necessary? What are the rules or conventions, if any, governing things like this?
I think all of those photos are already on Flickr. If anyone complains about 32 pixels somewhat resembling them, I’ll add black eye-bars for privacy.
“Thank god I can trust all governments to do what’s right.”
Well, i too trust this. =]
I love it! I made the mistake of switching back to iPhoto days before the Aperture 3 announcement to get the map and faces features. Now I think I’ll be switching back. Oh well … it looks amazingly powerful. What hardware are you running your Aperture setup on?
BTW, I’d love to get ETS Talk cracking again! That picture reminded me just how much fun we had.
Faces was the main reason I switched back to iPhoto from Aperture. Time really flies fast when you start looking through photos from the Faces interface. What I especially enjoyed was that Faces could find photos of my kids that I hadn’t tagged with their names – made it pretty trivial to find all the pictures I have of both with both of them in it.