I'd posted earlier about harvesting Web 2.0 for facial recognition. The first steps have been confirmed.
Shah, who is also chief executive of Riya (riya.com), the first photo sharing site to use facial recognition technology, thinks faces are still beyond computers' reach. "We tried the same algorithims that are used on Like.com for faces on Riya. We downloaded 50m faces from MySpace, and we brought in 100 users to test both the shopping and the faces. The face stuff got 2.5 out of 5 on average, the shopping stuff got 4.2 and up.
Fifty million faces. Perhaps their algorithm was thrown off by all the false pictures of celebrities and porn stars, as well as stolen images from other users.
