What is Face recognition?

Most of us know that face recognition is a growing technology. Television shows, movies and advertisements have made face recognition popular. Face recognition systems identify people by comparing their photographic image to a facial database. Video surveillances in most security systems make use of this technology. This technology is also used in forensics to identify possible criminals.

How do face recognition systems work?

All facial recognition systems use a recognition algorithm to identify faces. These algorithms are either geometric (feature based) or photometric (template based). Geometric methods  analyze the nodal points on the face. These nodal points are facial features such as distance between eyes, width of the nose or depth of the eye socket.

The full picture of the face is then generated. Photometric based approach is more statistical in nature and constructs a template from the image.  Both algorithms follow the steps of image acquisition, feature extraction and numerical template generation. The generated numerical map of the face is then compared with the database.

Aperture 3 is Apple‘s professional photography software. It was released in Feb 2010. About 200 new features have been incorporated into Aperture 3. All Mac users would already be familiar with iPhoto ’09 – a photography software that comes inbuilt with Mac. Iphoto ’09 uses face detection to keep a record of images by their faces. The faces of people in  photos are “tagged”. The images are displayed according to their “tagged” faces.

This technology is now available with Aperture 3 with additional  enhancements and extensions. The images that are displayed in  “Faces View” are limited to a particular project or album. This simplifies the searching for a particular  photo. Aperture 3 automatically detects faces in images when imported. It also finds similar images from existing photos. There is also a menu command that re-scans the photos to find potential faces that match, that were not detected initially!

Aperture 3 also uses GPS technology to organize photos by their places. A user could import locations using GPS tracking device or iPhone. Clicking on a particular location would then display all photos taken there.

Moreover, face detection can be turned on or off. This can prevent face detection while scanning or importing photos.

Priced at 199$, it also has a 30 -- day trial version for dowload.