Fresh from its launch a week ago, the new Chinese social network City!N is launching today one of the features that it hopes will differentiate it: face detection.
The tool draws a box around any faces it finds in pictures uploaded to the site. Users can then tag the face by typing identifying information into a database. They can then automatically share a photo with that friend’s face, since the social network can dispatch an alert to the friend saying a photo of them has been uploaded, said Simon Chan, co-founder of City!N.
“We are showing the world what an intelligent social networking service means,” Chan said.
At some point, users will be able to search for that same facial image across the network. They can thus find all of the pictures associated with that face on the site. The tool raises privacy concerns, since many users might not want their wild and crazy pictures found by distant friends. But Chan says that users are free to set their own photos to “private” settings so that they can’t be shared or discovered.
This new kind of social discovery tool is what Chan says will set the company apart. Eventually, the tool will be used to find people who might be a good match for the user because they meet certain facial characteristics.
There are other face-detection search engines available. Polar Rose of Sweden has a beta version of its face detection search engine. Polar Rose tries to avoid heavy computational requirements with a unique design. It takes the faces in pictures and converts the characteristics in them into 3-D animations. Those 3-D constructions are much easier to use in recognition tasks, since there is far less data to be computed, in contrast to the data associated with processing a photo of a face. Read the rest of this entry »
