Lets accept it facial recognition is a tricky business we have seen software’s in the past that have performed this task horribly.
Klik by Face.com is a facial recognition application that has the ability to tag photos of your Facebook friends. The application can apply different filters to a taken photograph but Klik was originally designed to identify your friends’ faces from their Facebook profiles.
To make it easier let’s assume you have a friend’s circle of approximately 50 friends and 25 of those friends are connected to you through Facebook. You and your 50 friends go out for a picnic and along all the other fun activities you also take a lot of pictures. Now you plan to share those pictures on Facebook. What Klik does is that it can take those pictures and identify those friends that are added on your Facebook profile and tag those pictures with their names automatically for upload on face book.
The application which is currently available on iOS taps into the users iPhone camera to take the pictures. Klik users must log into Facebook to enable the application to operate, and the user’s friends must share their profile photos publicly to allow Klik to access them.
The application which is running a face recognition software at its back then scans your friends profiles for their pictures, then those profile pictures are matched against the pictures that you are uploading. Once a match has been established your picture is tagged with a name and is ready to be published.
It is good to know that the application can only scan and tag photos of a users Facebook friends and no one else because the application is using Facebook as a source for matching the pictures. In terms of Privacy this is a very strong point because Google also claimed that it could support facial recognition of complete strangers with its patented Google Goggles technology but then it had to back track on its plan because there were serious privacy alarms raised.
If for instance Klik does not identify one of your friends in a picture who is also your friend on Facebook the application can be put into a manual learning mode where the user can direct the application to manually tag the photo and then tell the application to remember the tag for future refrence
Today’s technology is becoming more and more bamboozling. A users phone having the ability to recognize people is something that we could only dream of or only see in movies a couple of years ago but today we see fiction converting to reality. We truly are witnessing apex of an era.
Klik can be downloaded for iPhones here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/klik-by-face.com/id484990787?mt=8
