Comments on: Photo match software?

Question: Photo match software?

Elminster24 — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 20:15:56 -0800

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.

By: Netzapper

Netzapper — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 20:39:21 -0800

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.

By: Iggley

Iggley — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 20:50:06 -0800

Check out the apple iPhoto software. It does a kind of face recognition among your photo collection.

By: Iggley

Iggley — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 20:54:13 -0800

sry, link

By: rhizome

rhizome — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 20:58:30 -0800

You're going to want to at least look at OpenCV, hook it up to your language of choice, and do some reading.

By: DrtyBlvd

DrtyBlvd — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 07:31:29 -0800

I think TinEye might do this for you?

By: Good Brain

Good Brain — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 21:17:00 -0800

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.