Photo match software?

April 16, 2010 8:15 PM

PhotoRecognitionFilter: I'm looking for inexpensive (or ideally open source) image matching software that is relatively easy to build a website around (with some decent coding knowledge).

I have a concept for a site where people upload a photo of a face, and then the site would find pictures that are the closest matches from a database of other photos that I would upload, and then serve up the matches.

So for example, I upload a picture of a large person with certain facial features, it would spit back similar images from the database, but the original uploaded photo would not be amongst those matches returned.

Does any out-of-the-box solution like this even exist? I know a lot of science goes into matching facial features and body features but I haven't been able to find anything that is a packaged solution for purchase.

posted by Elminster24 to computers & internet (6 answers total)

Does any out-of-the-box solution like this even exist? I know a lot of science goes into matching facial features and body features but I haven't been able to find anything that is a packaged solution for purchase.

I would guess not, unless you're looking for multi-million dollar security biometrics solutions. Those exist, although they have reliability issues as well.

Image matching is a very tough problem. Even matching line drawings is a tough problem. I did work on this as a student, with one of the top researchers in the field, and our progress was glacial and incremental.
posted by Netzapper at 8:39 PM on April 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Check out the apple iPhoto software. It does a kind of face recognition among your photo collection.
posted by Iggley at 8:50 PM on April 16, 2010

sry, link
posted by Iggley at 8:54 PM on April 16, 2010

You're going to want to at least look at OpenCV, hook it up to your language of choice, and do some reading.
posted by rhizome at 8:58 PM on April 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

I think TinEye might do this for you?
posted by DrtyBlvd at 7:31 AM on April 17, 2010

Picasa and iPhoto are able to do a reasonable job of face matching because the problem space is well bounded. A given user might have thousands of photos, but a couple hundred people probably account for 90% of the faces. Even then, you have to spend some time training the system.

The human brain is good at distinguishing faces, so you may be able to get away with a 95% false positive rate if you can throw up 50 faces per results page.
posted by Good Brain at 9:17 PM on April 17, 2010