Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Flickr, beards and feature recognition

So it looks like Flickr is applying image recognition beyond face recognition. A couple of months ago they demoed their "Park or Bird?" feature recognition system, but I hadn't realized they'd put anything into production until today.

Yesterday, I uploaded some old photos from mid 2000 that I'd taken with my first digital camera, and had recently recovered (thanks Dana). This morning I noticed that someone had found the photo below by searching for "Beard". That seemed odd, since I hadn't tagged any of the old photos. The only way that Flickr could know that Gac has a beard is by looking at the photo itself.



Something feels a little bit creepy about this, but on the other hand it's also pretty cool.

I would like to see Flickr expose this more explicitly, and give me an opportunity to edit these automatically added tags.

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