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Riya Eases Pain of Digital Image Management 63

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the everyone-needs-a-gimick dept.
Vitaly Friedman writes to tell us Wired is covering a new service that hopes to alleviate some of the woes of digital picture management using face-recognition technology. Riya, requires a bit of upfront training but thereafter it is able to identify and tag individuals in your pictures along with text recognition for street signs and the like. The service also plans to offer the ability to make your online photo albums public, private, or viewable by invitation.
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Riya Eases Pain of Digital Image Management More

Riya Eases Pain of Digital Image Management

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  • I think they were warned (Score:5, Informative)

    by plover ( 150551 ) * on Saturday November 12, 2005 @04:27PM (#14016900) Homepage Journal
    I looked at all the shiny stuff on their site, and then figured "OK, I'll sign up and try it." But the signup page said "IE 6 only". OK, fine, I'll hold my nose and fire up IE. Only after that do I discover the alpha phase is by "email invite only".

    It's almost as if they were exactly prepared for a slashdotting! Very clever people, indeed.

  • Not very useful. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Seumas ( 6865 ) on Saturday November 12, 2005 @04:29PM (#14016913)
    Most of my photos are upskirts of random strangers at the mall. This service is only useful if I'm going to be photographing the same shaved vaginas over and over again and, for that to happen, I'd have to be incredibly lucky. You try asking a hottie out when you have mirrors on your shoes and a camera with the "record" light on, aimed upward from knee-height.

  • So when Google buys them... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Grab a shot from your office security camera of the guy that just came in for a job interview. Use Google Image search now with Riya and find all those photos of him passed out drunk in college his buddies posted to their Flickr account, or the nude images he posted to "that" site, or how he's doing on Hot or Not.

  • Actually, this could be really helpful! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I can't remember all the times I've sobered up after a weekend bender, only to download the camera and ask myself "Jesus, whose **** is that???"

    This will make it so much easier to find all the right people when I have to make that awkward call from the clinic.
  • Here's a thought for an interesting/scary feature: The ability to search across all public albums for a particular person within a given timeframe, based upon the timestamp of the photograph. So you could say "Find pictures of Sue from Dec 2 to Dec 6". Now maybe Sue was supposed to be 'out of town', but you find her with someone else...

    This should be fun. ;)
  • When I say that the "Pain of Digital Image Management" is mostly RSI.
  • From TFA;

    Castera also wonders if Riya might be useful for paternity tests.

    "I submitted some photos of a little boy and others of his father -- who is my best friend -- and Riya found the resemblance," said Castera, a French industrial designer. "It's very touching."

    Trusting some unknown face recognition software to do "paternity tests" is a little out there.
    Isn't that how paternity was determined back in old days? ("'E's the spitting image of the Duke 'e is.")

    • Trusting some unknown face recognition software to do "paternity tests" is a little out there.

      It's no worse than tatooing something that you translated into Japanese with Babelfish. (Okay, he didn't, but only because I showed him what it looks like when you translate it *back*. He was going to, though.)
  • is Slashdot going to start promoting everyone's new photo sharing website? Like most, I clicked on this, tried to sign up, and "We only support IE6". (Me dragging Riya to Recycle Bin, Empty Recycle Bin)
  • Google will buy this company. This would be great for intergration with their already pritty good photo software. I like the idea of being able to seach my harddrive for all photos of certian people from along time ago.
    • I agree- Google are bound to have noticed at this stage, and picasa is such a sweet lil' piece of software that it would make perfect sense to integrate this functionality.

      Alternatively, this could be produced as a separate app. that tags your photos with picasa-fiendly info, like metadata, which will then read in when you use picasa.

      I don't see a piece of software getting good penetration without being a killer way of managing your photos as well- and that is a large design task in itself. Better to
    • Google will buy this company. This would be great for intergration with their already pritty good photo software.

      If it works, then sure. I highly, highly suspect that it doesn't work. I've RTFA, and I've gone through their information pages, and something is incredibly suspicious.

      Let me put it another way - anyone with an ounce of lateral thinking, when first introduced to the Flickr concept, thought "Gee, wouldn't it be great if I didn't have to tag this stuff - If Flickr could do this for me by identifyin
  • I know this probably won't interest Americans, but if this type of software can read street signs- can we also assume it will recognize traffic signs and house numbers?

    A lot of countries don't have access to free information, so this technology if it worked would seriously harm some of the mapping data monopolies.
    • A lot of countries don't have access to free information, so this technology if it worked would seriously harm some of the mapping data monopolies.

      I'm stumped. How is recognizing signposts going to help with cartography?
      • Drive around with a GPS and digicam, or put the combo on taxis and other vehicles, and you'd have a city's map in little time. That won't help you map tree cover in the Amazon, must most of the hackers I know interested in geodata are very interested in free street-level data.

  • Anusol eases the pain of digital rectal examinations by soothing haemorrhoids. Time for my pills.

  • At first i misread this for "digital rights management" i thought they had invented a DRM scheme that will only play music if the person who bought it is looking into the camra
  • It's calling Opera users as Firefox users! Don't ridicule us like that! ;-)

    Seriously, I don't understand why they *block* browsers like that. So, it renders a bit wrong? Whoop-di-doo... Before they've started supporting these browsers, if it would get popular, someone has written e.g. a Greasemonkey script to fix it. I can imagine an Internet bank doing it for it not having passed a browser security test yet and they'd have such routines, but a photo search service? What terrible things could happen from a

  • Anyone know offhand how they do the photo tagging? I use Picasa and do my tagging manually. I have a few hundred photos I just scanned and I don't want to manually tag them with names if there's an automatic way. Do any of these tagging programs use the same tagging format? I think Picasa uses data files in each directory and some kind of central database. I imagine each program does something proprietary so none of it carries over between programs, but I could be wrong and I haven't looked into it yet.

    Per

    • Anyone know offhand how they do the photo tagging? I use Picasa and do my tagging manually. ... I think Picasa uses data files in each directory and some kind of central database.

      I don't really know what pica or riya do but it would not take much. Most image formats have room in the image itself for tags. You can see and set them with editors like gimp or hexedit. The name itself, if unique, is enough for most databases and the information could easily fit into the picture. All of it seems creepy and i

    • You should hope they use the IPTC fields on the jpegs. Standards are good.
  • i love to run this software over the last 6 years of digital pics i have (approx 2500 pictures) - mostly of my two kids from birth til now (damn trigger happy parents =).
    it'd be very interesting to see how accurately it could pick the kids up from birth ranging through to how they look now - completely different.
    if it could do it accurately, i wonder if they could use it to artificially age photographs of people - ie kids missing for years and years.

  • It looks like they didn't even have the name Riya as of August of this year. It was Ojos [businessweek.com]. Their main guy even has a blog [typepad.com] where you can follow up on their Series B financing from the VCs. If this guy wants to make it big, their US and India teams should get the technology polished and then license it to Google for inclusion in their Google Desktop, with support for external media (e.g. DVDs full of photos).

    Later, they could expand it out to search for the same faces in movies. Whoa! Hold on. You all ar

  • The Riya launch party is this Friday, November 18th in Atherton, CA. Details at http://ojos.wikispaces.com/Riya+Launch+Details [wikispaces.com]
  • This is a nice publicity stunt, but lots of people are working on this and face recognition doesn't work very well yet. So, don't worry about your privacy just yet.
  • If anybody wants to invite someone who would be helpful with the testing, I'd sure love to give it a shot.

    Too many photos, not enough organizational skill.

    Ask and ye shall recieve, right? Please?
  • I remember reading an article in Wired last year about a company integrating GPS units into digital cameras. The Lat/Lon would be included into the metadata/timestamp of the image.

    Think of the possibilities of this... Timestamps combined with location would make sorting thousands or even hundreds of thousands of pictures MUCH eaiser!!! Perhaps an onboard compass included would give a bearing as to which way the camera was pointing.

    Does anyone else have any information about this sort of thing?

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