Picasa Web Albums Uses Facial Recognition
The Picasa desktop client has been released in version 3 with some changes, and Picasa Web Albums also saw a revamp with new features. For instance, there’s now an Explore tag which lets you visually discover new pics by others.
An interesting new feature is Picasa’s face recognition. Google acquired image recognition company Neven Vision a while ago, and now Picasa got some of that technology, too*. Get started by logging in to Picasa Web Albums and clicking the “Try it” button below the Name Tags headline to the right. This will trigger a job with a progress bar, and you can check back a while later. (At first, none of my test photos seemed to yield matches, but today I’m getting some results.)
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Philipp Lenssen
Registered Since: 2008-07-15 20:37:19
About the Author: Philipp Lenssen from Germany, author of 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google, shares his views & news on the search industry in the daily Google Blogoscoped.
Posts by Philipp Lenssen:
Search For Text In Videos With iGoogle Gadget
Google released a well-working iGoogle gadget in which they extract text information from video content. The Elections Video Search gadget – its standalone page can be accessed as well – lets you search for keywords across YouTube’s US politician channels, like Barack Obama’s. Clicking on a result item will load the video in question into the player embedded in the widget, with the specific occurrences of the word in the video color-marked on the timeline.
For instance, I searched for the word “friendship” and got a result titled “Obama Anniversary of Israeli Independence”. Moving the time bar line towards one of the yellow markers, I’m hearing Obama say, “… let us renew the friendship between our nations …”. Another search for “bubble sort” returns a quip from a Q&A Obama held at the Google headquarters, where Obama is answering a programming question.
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