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I have a very large photo gallery with thousands of similar people, objects, locations, things. The majority of the people in the photos have their own user accounts and avatar photos to match. There are also logical short lists of people potentially in the photo based on additional data available for each photo. I allow users to tag photos with their friends and people they know but an automated process would be better.

I've used photo tagger/finder from face.com integrating with Facebook photos and the Google Picasa photo tagger for personal albums also does the same thing and is exactly what I'm looking to do.

Is there a PHP script, API for Google Picasa, face.com or other recognition service or any other open source project that provides server-side facial recognition and/or grouping photos by similarity?

Examples: As you can see, various photo sharing sites offer the feature, but are there any that provide an API for images stored on my own server or something extensive enough to link into my own gallery and tagging system?

Janusz
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Peter Craig
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  • I doubt that there is anything like this that works Server-Side because it would be a possibly CPU intensive operation. – Earlz Jul 31 '09 at 04:53
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    Obviously there are already numerous server-side examples of facial recognition and detection, whether they are available to connect to externally via API or working source is available was the question. – Peter Craig Jul 31 '09 at 05:27
  • You wouldn't do face recognition in PHP! (detection, maybe) – UpTheCreek Jul 31 '09 at 06:33

3 Answers3

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If you want to do it real-time in PHP, there is a way. Check out the solution presented here: it was mentioned on News.YC a month or two ago.

Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, as you mention, seems to have some pretty good technology, and they have an SDK available: http://www.pittpatt.com/products/ftr_sdk/sdk_users_guide.html. They also have a web demo, so if you wanted to be sneaky, you could probably hack something up that would just feed images into their demo. They'd probably stop you eventually, though - better to contact them directly.

j0k
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Zack Burt
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  • I had noted those two examples and am thinking pittpatt is most extensive, although from a simple start the other resource at least detects faces for users to then to manually tag/organise. I wonder if once a few faces have been grouped, the/a system can recognise patterns within those groups and "learn" faces for better suggestions, I guess aging photos would make this tricky. – Peter Craig Aug 02 '09 at 04:09
  • Seems like http://www.pittpatt.com/products/ftr_sdk/sdk_users_guide.html is no more available. I just checked for it! – Aman Aug 21 '10 at 06:04
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    Pitt patt has been acquired by google and is no longer available for public use. – halfpastfour.am Jul 07 '12 at 10:58
  • Google, Inc (the maker of google search) has acquired that company. – Ryan Oct 01 '12 at 03:45
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Check out face.com. They opened up their API yesterday.

Note: Face.com is no longer offering their API. (thanks facebook...)

hitautodestruct
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Hendrik
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Check out PicsMatch.com! I've been quite pleased with it, but even the simplest browsing tacks are quite slow. Well worth the low price.

  • Another good example for what I need, useful for personal photo albums, but in terms of large on-line photo repositories linked with other tools/info it's probably not so usable, unless it possibly outputs some log files or can run server-side? – Peter Craig Aug 02 '09 at 04:05
  • Picsmatch no longer is a spam free website. – Andrew Sep 09 '13 at 22:26