Riya: A Big Leap In Visual Search Engines
Author: Danny Wirken

Watch out for new software that will give a new face to search
engines. Rather, a program that includes faces in the search
function. A new California-based company, Ojos, developed the
online photo-based search service named Riya. With the use of
avant-garde technology that allows face recognition within
photos, the system is made to recognize individual persons as
well as text in the user's digitally captured photos and labels
them automatically—no more tedious searching for people in
unnamed photos.

Despite its only-recent use in search engine technology, the
face recognition software is not entirely new. This is a
development of a company called Evolution Robotics, used in
software that operates in the revolutionary Sony AIBO robot. In
addition, Adobe's Photoshop Elements 4.0, a photo-modification
program, has a somewhat similar function, although it does not
have the ability to label individual photos with exact names.

Of course, Riya will not be able to recognize certain faces
immediately after you have installed the software. You need to
put in several minutes of training the program to identify a
certain person whose pictures you need to find, although once
it's done, you can easily carry on with the search. Not a bad
service at all for tech savvy individuals, who are fast
becoming shutterbugs.

Moreover, training the service can be pretty easy. While
organizing your photos, just be sure to input the name and
email address that corresponds to each new face you happen
upon. The second time you see that same face, a drop down list
of options will include the associated name, so you can simply
choose from there. In due time, the service will become
accustomed to identifying your family, relatives, friends,
business contacts, and others that pop up often enough in your
photo collection. Tags will then be made automatically, and the
best way to ensure it does this is to train it often.

For the most part, Riya is a Web-based system that requires the
user to have a small-sized file that helps your computer upload
pictures to servers of the company. You just need to indicate
on the PC module the part of your computer to look for your
photo collection in, and you can continue to do work as it
serves up the files in the background. However, uploading
hundreds of photos have taken more than a few hours during
post-launch software tests. This is a shortcoming that Ojos
must work on to continue developing Riya into a top-notch
application. Meanwhile, the company has recommended that heavy
users schedule the uploading during their sleeping hours.

The service will then scan for people's face in your photos
once you have uploaded them. At first, no tagging will be done,
as it will only collect the thumbnails that correspond to every
unique face found in your set of pictures. Of course, there's
no guarantee that two different pictures of the same person
will be recognized as one distinguished face; unless it has
been trained to recognize specific faces, photos of one person
in, say, five different angles may very well be identifies as
five different people. Although it may be able to tell
correctly that two different photos contain the same person,
its capacity to do so will only increase as it is told whom the
different faces belong.

The reason for using an email address to help identify a person
on a photo is to provide each face a matchless classifier. This
way, the amount of training you've spent time on can be
instantly shared with other users of Riya. For instance, if
you've trained the system to recognize the individual members
of your family, then other relatives can also gain from your
work in training the system. It is up to you if you would like
to share your Riya training, which would then allow the other
user, given your permission, to search a member of your family
once, using the exact same email address you used to tag the
family member, and it will at once single his or her pictures
out from the other user's personal photo collection.

Something about the workings of this system might not seem
appealing to some people; they may even find it frightening, to
think that tons of photos with their faces in it and labeled
with their email addresses may be accessible to others, maybe
even strangers, at any time. It would be comforting to know
that only the company can completely access this record of
faces. Those who may post pictures with your face in it can
allow others to view them, as well as make the system training
open to them, but rest assured that the email address linked to
the person is by no means revealed through the software.

In effect, another user will fail to identify you with the use
of the Riya database if he or she does not already know your
email address and possess photos with your face in them.
Ideally, those who do know are people you know and can entrust
with personal data, yet some users are still reluctant to
entertain the idea of having a software company gathering email
addresses without their knowledge or assent, despite its
non-disclosure policy.

Initially, Riya was only able to recognize faces in photos that
are deliberately posed, with the person staring right into the
camera. Even a post-launch internal testing was able to reveal
a number of serious bugs to Ojos' team, which they were able to
fix in a matter of days, thankfully, but only future upgrades
will unveil its full potential. Until then, imagine the
convenience of having Riya in your computer system. Image files
containing text will be easily searchable, visually, while
finding people in your digital pictures collection will be a
breeze. In the future with Riya, locating the files you need
while you work on a website design or composite photo will be
much faster and possibly hassle-free.


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