Sunday, April 18, 2010

"Faces" and Family Resemblances


I've been playing with iphoto and the "faces" feature. With 'faces' you identify a face and then iphoto offers you other pictures it thinks are possibly the same face and you accept or reject them.

I started with Miss T, of course. And the faces that came up frequently as possibly Miss T's, were her mother, her grandmother (that would be me) and both of her female cousins. These are not people who look alike, exactly, but it makes sense that there is a resemblance.

Then, I did Son of.. and the faces that it identified as being possibly Son of, were The COG, his cousin, Tober (Sister Rose's son) , and his aunt, Sister May. You would never ordinarily think of May and Son of resembling each other. I imagine that there is some kind of algorithm about the relative placement of features on the face that iphoto is responding to.

2 comments:

peaceable_tate said...

Interesting test of the function! How many faces do you have in the pool? I mean, is it possible for Son of or Miss T to look like some random stranger?

Though why you would have a photo of a random stranger in your iPhoto, I don't know.

Vivi said...

Crowd scenes? Photos of Miss T at Ikea, with random folks in the background?