I came across to a similar technology when I interviewed a candidate for my previous company. She develop a colour recognition application by calculating percentage of colours in a photo for her thesis project. But my interest dies as I can't imagine how to monetize the idea. That is before I discovered Riya.
Riya is a facial and text recognition technology with an intelligent interface. Face recognition technology isn't new. You can find it in cameras, cellphones and biometric devices but for the sake of web application, this is really great.
I decided to try out Riya's functionality. The process starts with registration and choosing a privacy setting on your pictures. You then download a client application (around 40MB) that uploads photos you choose to include in Riya. The actual uploading takes a while - about 4 hours for each GB of photos. Instead of waiting around, Riya will email you when the process is complete.
That’s when the fun starts. In my case about 60 pictures were uploaded. I was presented with a view of facial thumbnails of everyone in my photos. Riya asks that you begin to educate it by telling it who the people are. And then click the "Run Rec" button, it then very quickly starts to auto-tag pictures with a surprising level of accuracy.I could also allow friends to tag and search my photo and let it all searchable in public search. On this extend I realize that Riya might have some privacy issues in the future. Imagine if Riya get so much data on people that I could take a picture of a crowd, upload it to Riya, and instantly have the names of every single person in the crowd. It almost like FBI's backup suspect database.
But if Riya choose client/partner wisely it might benefits us all. Just look at like.com. You can identify a similar accessories or item detected in any photo. You can even select your favorite celebrities photos and copy their style. Paris Hilton wannabe, this is your day.
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