ENLIGHTEN3D

By Joshua Koopferstock

You tag this photo:

Source: www.bt.dk

Polar Rose finds this photo:

Source: www.newprophecy.net

With facial recognition in Picasa Web Albums launched yesterday, an exciting computer vision application once again bumps heads against privacy concerns.  On the one hand, automatic tagging of photos through facial recognition can be a useful time saver; if I have an album of 100 pictures of my family vacation with the same 5 people, I would much rather have my computer tag them for me than having to sift through them one-by-one adding tags.  On the other hand, I might not necessarily want all photos of me to be so easily found by anyone.

Picasa Web Albums seems to be OK in how it deals with this issue, at least for now.  Users only tag their own albums, and, as far as I can tell, the information gathered is not used to search Google Imagesand automatically tag images of the people you tag in your web albums.

This is not the case with every player stepping into this industry.  Polar Rose, announced late-2006, uses facial recognition on user-tagged photos to search for more photos of an individual in any publicly available images.  The service is designed as a browser plug-in and an embeddable widget for photo-sharing sites, and rumour has it that a partnership with one of the major sites is imminent.  Users tag photos of people that they find anywhere online, and Polar Rose uses that information to find that same face across other images.

The example at the beginning of this post should illustrate why this may be a concern.  For Paris Hilton, perhaps her image benefits when scandalous pictures surface, but this is not the case for most of us.  Should photos of people really be that searchable?

In reality, though, the point is moot.  Using Google Image search, I probably could have found the same 2 pictures shown above; with facial recognition, this just becomes more efficient.  If you have been using Facebook for the past few years, you have probably already come to terms with the fact that people can quickly find many pictures of you, including ones that others took without your consent (though in fairness to Facebook, you can untag and render unsearchable pictures you don’t like).

Conclusion: from a computer vision standpoint, it is neat to see these technologies reach the mass market.  From a privacy outlook, more (visual) information about us is going to become accessible without our direct consent, but only information that was publicly available in the first place, and this development is probably inevitable.

On a final note, there is one feature proposed by Polar Rose which I can’t help but find far more creepy than useful: personal photo RSS feeds.  Basically, get instantly updated by RSS each time a new photo of a targeted person is found.  Stalkers rejoice!