December 23, 2005
Camera phone helps label snaps
A new project will allow the growing number of Bluetooth-enabled camera phone users to organise their digital photo albums by automatically identifying and labelling the people and places within each snap, as they are taken, writes New Scientist.
The concept, being developed by Marc Davis of Yahoo's Berkeley research lab, is based on a central server that registers details sent by the phone when the photo is taken. These include the nearest cellphone mast, the strength of the call signal and the time the photo was taken.
The system also identifies the other Bluetooth-enabled cellphones within range of the photographer and combines this with the time and place information to create a shortlist of people who might be in the picture. This can then be combined with facial-recognition algorithms to identify the subjects from the shortlist.
In tests Davis and his team found that by combining facial recognition software with context information the system could correctly identify people 60 per cent of the time. The context information can also be combined with image-recognition software to identify places within photos.
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