Cow’s Blog

June 17th, 2006

Of all the so called Web 2.0 companies, Riya has really caught my eye. Riya originally started as a way to share your photos on the web, a bit like flickr but with facial recognition so you could find all photos which had you in them, one of your friends in, etc. They’ve changed their focus to an image search engine.

Riya 2.0 will be a web-wide (public) visual search engine that uses face and image similarity to search the web. We are calling this new kind of public web search: Visual Search. Why? Because you will be able to search by clicking on / submitting a photo instead of having to type in text.

At the moment you can enter names and find all photos which have someone or something in e.g. Big Ben or Keira Knightley.  

There’s a bit of info on facial recognition on the riya website. 

API

ZDNet reports that Riya are opening up an API on Tuesday which will allow you to incorporate Riya’s technology in your own software or website for non-commercial use:

"The new API opens all the functionally of Riya to application developers on a non-commercial basis, with commercial use pending request and review. The functions range include face detection, face recognition, text detection, text recognition, search, tagging and even building training sets," Shah said.

A basic use of API could enable an application to use Riya’s face detection technology to find faces, autocrop the images and then send them to another application.

This could be really interesting. You could have programs which will look through your image collection and automatically find a picture of you say taken, say, 3 months apart and could generate a series of images which shows you how your apperance has changed over the years.

Riya 2.0 

ZDNet says that Riya 2.0 will be open to the public in about 3 months. There will be a browser extension allowing you to right click and image and find other images on the internet which are similar. This could be useful at finding plagurism.

One thing that I think will become really popular would be the use of facial recognition technology to find people who look like you. If Riya does it well, this could well become the next big thing on the internet. Everyone has googled their own name before so the natural progression of ego surfing would be to look for people who look a bit like you.

Generating 3D images from 2D images  

Through Google Blogoscoped, I found this cool application which will analyze a 2D image and try to generate a 3D version from it. I’ve not downloaded it as it seems like it’s requires quite a lot of manual work and installing to make it work properly.

This technology could be really great when it evolves to the point where you could take a couple of photos around your house or school, load it into your favourite first person shooter game and frag aliens in a virtual recreation of your home.

Google could also do what A9 is doing by taking photos on streets of major cities and automatically generate a 3D textured building in Google Earth. 

• Cool Stuff , Internet , Web 2.0
• Comments(2)