LR6 Face Recognition?!

Dante_Stella

Rex canum cattorumque
Local time
9:37 PM
Joined
Apr 28, 2007
Messages
1,864
So the first mistake was setting LR6's face recognition module loose on 160,000 photos (many of which are scans of substantial size).

That said, the module seems to have some features, some good:
  • It does not confuse ex-girlfriends with my wife.
  • It recognizes my childhood dog.
  • It does not confuse my childhood dog with my ex-girlfriends.
  • It does not confuse my wife with my mother.
  • It has a very high recall and excellent precision compared to iPhoto, Aperture, and Picasa.
But there are a couple of things to flag:
  • Unlike most machine learning systems I have used, this one never seems to reach a stable point. No matter how high the precision and recall, you still get tons of "unnamed" faces that actually have the right names on them. For a system like this to be effective, it needs a fault tolerance. The goal of this system should not be to reach 100.0% accuracy. It should be to get to a point where things are good enough to serve as a labor saving tagging device.
  • It is dog slow to look at said "unnamed faces" display.
  • For unnamed faces, you only have the choices of (a) accept or (b) delete the face box. You see that as "Dante Stella?" What the system needs is a "no" button that gets rid of the face until the analytics can come back with the next best match.
  • Unlike other systems, you can see that each call is only resulting in the filing of that precise picture and any duplicates - NOT what you would expect, which is that as you update the data points, many things are going to update, which presumably includes things disappearing from the unnamed faces list.
Completely unexplained is how in the midst of this, my iMac developed a bullseye chip in the front glass. Core overheating?
 
Have you compared it to OSX Photos? I decided to export jpegs out of LR and use Photos for casual photo viewing, but after many weeks of working on the face farm I've decided that this aspect of Photos remains...pretty bad. Lots of things that aren't faces registering as faces, lots of real faces that don't register at all, and lots of near-identical photos of the same person that Photos just shrugs at. I haven't dared activate face rec in LR6.

I otherwise quite like this workflow, though: LR for editing stuff from my "real" cameras; Photos for exported jpegs and iPhone shots. It's nice to have every picture I've ever taken thumbnailed on my portable telephone.
 
I switched from Aperture to LR, and I also export JPEGs to Photos for sharing with family, etc.

I do not use the face recognition functionality with either. I have always thought photo face recognition kind of creepy - especially in Facebook. 🙂
 
I wonder if there is a particular technique that can be used to assist the algorithm. I tend to switch between the face view, then double-clicking on a face and confirming the similar faces that do in fact match, then finding the false positives and doing the same to accentuate the separation between the two in the algorithm's feature space.
 
Back
Top Bottom