Vivek’s Soapbox

Waiting in my inbox this morning was an invitation to try out the beta of Riya. So I signed up, downloaded their uploading tool, and started uploading.

The uploading tool not only transfers the photos to Riya, but also performs the actual recognition of faces. When the pictures are uploaded, you can log into the web site and start attaching names to recognized faces. Once you give it 20-30 samples of a specific person, it does a pretty good job of recognizing more pictures of the same person — at least for frontal shots. Later, you can go pick out the pictures it recognized incorrectly.

Another nice touch — it does OCR on text in pictures. But this seems to work only with more or less horizontal text, and with fonts that are common.

I never thought I’d use an online service for storing all my pictures because I just love having them locally, to browse whenever I like. But this is compelling enough that I think I’m going to start slowly uploading all my pictures to Riya.

Number one wish for Riya: have a local client that allows offline browsing of your photo collection, with facial recognition. Or better still, standardize a format for specifying regions within a picture, and metadata associated with it (e.g. the rectangle from (x1, y1) to (x2, y2) has Vivek’s face), so that multiple clients can use it. Not sure how well that’s going to work with their business model, though.

Overall, I think this has the potential to be something really great!