Tuesday, October 19, 2010

The small faces


You gotta love face recognition software.
I'm surprised and amazed to spot Syril Astrahan in there...ha!







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3 comments:

Parm said...

What?

No!

What?

Where?

Never mind, I likely wouldn't recognize her face (perhaps flowered pants . . . ?).

I am more curious about this image. The borders on each little face appear to be artificial, like these are computer-cropped images. Was this collage somehow done automatically? Some program that skimmed a ton of your photo files, found the faces, and automatically cropped them and then dumped them onto this virtual bulletin board? Was an interesting program, if that is the case.

October 19, 2010 at 6:43 PM
E. Face said...

You have it right--the latest version of Picasa goes thru all your photo files and picks out faces. Once it finds a face, it crops it and adds it to one huge "People" folder. Then you can use the other tools to mess around with your new collection of portraits(in my case 4,812 of them).

So, I selected the whole folder and used the collage tool. I didn't mess with it too much, other than trying to get rid of shots that were too dark. So, there are 4,000 or so small faces--stacked up god knows how deep--in that image.

There are some interesting faces in this image: one of the source photos was a cover scan of the 1972 Pioneer Yearbook (thus the pic of SA and other classmates). Plus, all of my scans of magazine articles and other assorted paper ephemera. That's a lot of faces. The recognition program made a couple of funny but understandable mistakes; there's a dog in there, a art-deco column, and something that looks like a bike part.

The Picasa program will also find matching faces and put them in their own folder for you. There's a feature called "Face Movie" that I haven't tried yet. So many tools, so little time!

October 20, 2010 at 9:10 PM
Parm said...

Wow.

I wonder if Picasa also offers an Engleknot Face tool? You know, to automatically collect together all faces that bear a more-than-passing resemblance to Mr. Bread's bud?

Actually, if you scanned in the face of Face, Picasa would do exactly that, true?

How amusing. And frightening.

October 23, 2010 at 2:58 PM

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