Aperture 3: Low Cost Facial Recognition for Libraries & Archives?
One of my first jobs in LIS was in the UVic Archives between 1989-93. I worked under then University Archivist Chris Petter on the historical photo collections; mostly moving slides & photos into acid free housing, and then describing the photos at hand.
While I'm not an Apple user, I did recently come across an interesting feature in the new version of Apple's Aperture 3 called 'Faces' that might have helped the photo identification process. Through proper training, the Faces feature can apply names to your personal photo collection.
For the photographers out there, this sounds like a fantastic feature. Just in terms of the raw volume of digital images that most create. But what about using this application for an Archival institutional collection? If it isn't being used in some capacity already, this would seem to be a low-cost & valuable tactic.
I'd be very interested if any Archivists come across this post and are willing to chime in with a comment from their daily experience. I'm presuming that facial recognition technology has traditionally been too costly for most Archival programmes. But I could be completely wrong.
While I'm not an Apple user, I did recently come across an interesting feature in the new version of Apple's Aperture 3 called 'Faces' that might have helped the photo identification process. Through proper training, the Faces feature can apply names to your personal photo collection.
For the photographers out there, this sounds like a fantastic feature. Just in terms of the raw volume of digital images that most create. But what about using this application for an Archival institutional collection? If it isn't being used in some capacity already, this would seem to be a low-cost & valuable tactic.
I'd be very interested if any Archivists come across this post and are willing to chime in with a comment from their daily experience. I'm presuming that facial recognition technology has traditionally been too costly for most Archival programmes. But I could be completely wrong.
posted by Steve Matthews at 3/04/2010
3 Comments:
Doesn't Picasa do much the same thing? (I don't use it, but my brother does, and says it's surprisingly accurate.)
On quick review, it seems so. Though I have no clue to accuracy of either.
Second more important question is if it's seeing any use on photo collections? Perhaps that's just a matter of time.
Thought this was a great idea so I have blogged about the possibilities on our site at http://www.andornot.com/blog/post/Low-Cost-Facial-Recognition-for-Libraries-Archives.aspx
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