graham.reeds/

Facial Recognition

Picasa has had what all programs seem to get at some point in their life: A .5 update release.

This one is pretty good too. The feature I’ve wanted since I poured all my photos I’ve ever taken is now here and it is pretty good too: Facial Recognition.

The interface is nice and the algorithm is pretty good.  I have several shots of a friend with red hair and then a few with black hair. If you’ve use the interface you’ll know that Picasa groups faces together that might be similar. I’ve seen her face several times while removing the majority of the faces (me, Mrs Bear, etc) and getting down to the less photographed. So I tag her the first time, tag the second, but the algorithm they use must of decided that the larger sample of her face now does include the photos with black hair and so decided to include it. Another example is it accurately tagged a female friend at a fancy dress party as a pirate – complete with beard.

While it is quite accurate there has been some mishaps – two of my friends ended up with photos in each others folders, one being indian and the other white. Pictures of faces side-ways to the camera seem to get lumped in together. For the pictures which Picasa is unsure of it gives you a little tick or cross to decide, though sometimes it mistags a person and doesn’t give that interface. Speed could do with a bump – 18,000 photos took about 6 hours to analyze.

Now I have 9,300 faces to sift through…

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Update

It’s been a while since I posted, so what has been keeping me busy?

Work, it’s getting easier – I think I am getting into the VB6 mindset, but I still hate VBA with a passion. When is the nice .NET extension becoming available? Is it already, and could Reporting Services save our souls (not to mention our sanity)?

Space is coming along very slowly. Any time I sit down to work on it I have to spend about an hour refreshing my mind on what I have done – and I only have about 40 mins to do it in.

Had my birthday: One of my presents was an iPod from Mrs Bear – which gave me a lovely opportunity to hate iTunes all over again. This time I accidently deleted my play list, there is no undelete and then it synced it – wiping it. I’ve installed iTunes 9 but I don’t hold out any hope for them fixing all the problems with it. Another present is an ant farm – so along with my Sea Monkeys you could say I have Surf’n'Turf.

Another side effect of my birthday was my the choice of venues for a meal.  Since I’ve always wanted to eat there I picked Kaminaki and had some of the nicest fish I have ever eaten, and definately the nicest pitta bread ever. All this and despite the grumblings of some of my friends.

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iro·ny

Owning a book called Getting Things Done and never getting around to reading it.

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