Picasa face recognition and name tagging

Google's Picasa took a giant step forward yesterday with the implementation of face recognition software. After playing with it for a while, I must say that it is one of the neatest, most revolutionary pieces of desktop computing technology that I've seen in quite a while. It's been a long time since I have been genuinely wowed by an application (especially a free one); I literally burst out laughing with excitement when I saw it in action.

Here's how it works:
When you log in to Picasa, you'll see a little widget on the side of the screen with a button to activate the face recognition software. After clicking the button, the site will work behind the scenes for a few minutes (depending on how many pictures you have in your web albums) with a progress bar moving across the widget. When it is finished, you access a page that has extracted every face in every picture; in my albums, it found about 1,000 faces.

After finding the faces, it will group together the ones that it is "certain" are the same person into what I'll call a person category. For example, it found about 30 very clear instances of my face, which it placed into a single category, displaying a little icon for each instance. Each icon has a check box below it that is selected by default and may be deselected to indicate an incorrect person in the category. Below the icons, there is a simple text box that is used to tag all of the checked face instances in the category as a person. Conveniently, this name tagging section integrates with your Gmail contacts.

Going through my pictures, it found different instances of faces that it was less "certain" about, which it then placed into different face categories. Then it recommended name tags for the faces based on the tags that I had already used in other categories. In the 30 or so examples of my face that it placed in the first category, I standing straight up, smiling, and looking right into the camera. Photos where I was wearing sunglasses or looking to the side were grouped together in a different category and Picasa suggested that the person in the photos was me.

It will be interesting to see how social networks use this software in the future. Facebook already allows users to simply (though, manually) tag their friends in their pictures. I can just picture Facebook using face recognition software to identify people in the background of users' uploaded photos and tag them automatically. Imagine being automatically tagged in albums that you don't even know about. I'll bet college students would find it funny to get an email on Sunday mornings after their face appeared in a photo from the night before that was uploaded by a stranger!

And keep on eye on law enforcement's usage of this tool. From what I understand, they're already using facial recognition software. But if that usage was partnered with a major social networking platform, imagine the possibilities! The FBI or a police department could look at any publicly published photo on Facebook and run it through a face recognition application like Picasa. Who knows how many fugitives it would catch? I'll bet that a few wanted scofflaws and outlaws show up every now and then in nightclubs or other Facebook photo hotspots.