The New Face of Photography

Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks is reporting on increasingly successful attempts to make cutting edge technologies like “face tracking” and “facial recognition” a common…and very useful…tool in amateur photography. While cameras that can adjust to keep faces clear and in focus have been around for a while, the conventional wisdom has been that actual face recognition is simply too computationally expensive to do at any scale on diminutive platforms like digital cameras.

Face recognition requires computational horsepower that is hard to fit into the confines of a digital camera, but one company likely to help make it a reality is Fotonation, which already supplies face-detection software for dozens of camera models from Samsung, Pentax, and others. The computational challenge is reduced by the fact that most folks tend to photograph the same set of 25 or 30 people, Eric Zarakov, Fotonation's vice president of marketing, said in an interview here at the 6sight digital imaging conference. A camera could be "trained" to recognize just those particular people.

I am not sure the technical constraint described here is still genuine, however. For instance, even though we have no immediate plans to do so, the facial recognition technology that we’ve built at 3VR could be adapted to provide real-time recognition of thousands of individuals...even on devices as underpowered as consumer digital cameras. Amateur photography might benefit from the same approaches.