I'd know that face anywhere

You know the term "Aha! moment".  It's when you see something new to you and suddenly you wonder how the world has gotten along without it.  The first time I saw a spreadsheet on a PC.  The first time I saw sound manipulation on a PC.  The first time I saw 3D graphics on a PC.  These were Aha moments for me, moments when I realized I had underestimated the power of computers that could be carried in your arms if not your hands.

I had another Aha moment yesterday when I had my first serious encounter with Face Recognition Software, which I'll abbreviate FRS.  Like many of my Aha Moments, I didn't go looking for FRS.  I was looking for  a program to keep track of the thousands of pictures we have in our family collection.  I want something that is capable of tracking picture by content as well as location and file name - the whole who, what, where, why, etc.  This is one of those times when I want the computer to not just give me what I ask for but also what I meant to ask for.

As a start I Googled "photo album software free" and got a nice list of "10 best".  The number 1 listed program was not produced by the organization that produced the list - one good sign that the list was legitimate.  And the brief reviews of each of the 10 pieces of software correlated with the scores.  Another good sign.

I was surprised, though, that the first program, the highest recommendation was Google's Picaso.  I had installed that years ago but could never warm up to it.  Maybe Google had upgraded it a little, I thought.  Have they ever!.

I didn't bother downloading the program although that would have probably been the best thing to do.  But Picaso noticed right away that I didn't have the latest and recommended that I update. I did.  Shortly the requested update was downloaded and installed and the program opened  up.  I was shocked to see dozens of my picture folders listed and hundreds of my pictures.  I hadn't asked for that.  The first thing I learned about Picaso is that it is one of  those programs that makes all kinds of assumptions about what you want and starts doing them, letting you change your mind and the  program settings later.  That's probably what turned me off about it when I first installed it.  This time I let it go.

I let it go because in front of my eyes I was seeing what you've seen on TV and theater shows where a face flashes on a screen followed by a dozen others and we see the computer's thought process in selecting a good match from its database.  The computer was building a database of my pictures as I watched.  It lacked the names or "tags" to go with the separate piles it was making but that didn't slow down the matching process.  I clicked on a picture of me.  The computer instructed me to key in who that was. I entered my name and verified that it was a new person for this database.  Pictures flashed around the screen and I was presented with 15 or 20 more pictures of me - some identical to the first, most slightly different.  I was instructed to X out those pictures that weren't Arnold Loveridge and confirm those that were.  Another dozen or more were added to the page.  Like playing a game of "Fish" the computer was offering me pictures that it "recognized" as Arnold Loveridge.  I was witnessing FRS.

Voice Recognition Software translates the spoken word into the written word.  But it has to be taught how you say things.  Likewise FRS translates faces into names.  But it has to be carefully taught.
With 98,427 catalogued faces, my computer's database has identified so far 1,449 groups, each of which may be a separate person.  So far I've identified 59 people, some with over 2,000 pictures in my computer, some with less than a dozen.  I have a lot more to teach the computer. And I suspect it has a few more surprises for me.

Here is an example of a picture analyzed by Picaso which identified each of the faces and then matched them with names in its database.

And here's a picture I retrieved by asking for one with my older brother Bernell and me in the picture.  The program even looked back several decades to make the match!