Riya Facial Recognition Photo Search Site Set to Launch
Riya is a powerful new photo search site with an interesting broader vision: to make it easy to find every digital photo in the world. The site right now is in private alpha, but its set to roll out more broadly this week.
Using Riya, you can search by both tags you assign and/or the auto-tags Riya adds to photos. Riya add tags to photos with the help of what appears to be incredible face recognition technology. They remind me of LTU Technologies, a French company I worked with four years ago when I was with another agency. The Riya tour starts here. They also have a FAQ up on their wiki and much more on their blog. All photo searches are also output as RSS.
While I haven't personally tested this site. Their entry into the market is welcome. With Flickr now part of Yahoo and Picasa part of Google, we need nimble competitors to keep these guys playing their A game.
Technorati Tags: Flickr, Google, LTU Technologies, Photos, Picasa, Yahoo
Steve,
Would you like an invite to the alpha this week?
Tara
Posted by: Tara 'Miss Rogue' Hunt | Sunday, October 23, 2005 at 10:31 PM
Something here strikes me as a bit odd, just on the surface of it, not having thought about it much yet. We have this capability, and then we also have this "concern" re: racial profiling in the US, founded or unfounded (doesn't matter). Somehow the two seem to be oddly connected.
I look at this and my first reaction is to think "I'll kick the crap out of anyone who EVER posts a photo of me to Flickr without my permission."
I'm not sure how to reconcile the idea of the "post everything, share everything, all is good" mentality, which I think is REALLY cool BTW, with the "our government already has too much information about us" mentality. I can't say I have a definitive opinion on this yet, but it strikes me as odd, I'll just leave it at that.
Posted by: Lou | Sunday, October 23, 2005 at 11:44 PM
more information here...
http://cornell.elliottback.com/archives/2005/03/16/want-to-join-a-startup/
Posted by: splicedmice | Monday, October 24, 2005 at 01:06 AM
Steve, thanks for the quick review. One clarification, we are not in alpha yet. It is only this week we will begin the alpha.
Posted by: Munjal Shah | Tuesday, October 25, 2005 at 03:41 AM
Why not??? Very interesting project. I like it.
Posted by: John Beale | Tuesday, October 25, 2005 at 03:48 PM
Steve, have you seen MyHeritage.com yet? They also do face recognition on photos. They have a mission to help people who are into genealogy find their ancestors in photos submitted by other users. It reminds me of Riya but MyHeritage has a focus on historic scanned photos and adds family tree meta-data to photos.
BTW, I doubt Riya would really be able to find peoples' photos on the Web, the amount of pre-processing that this would require seems to be possible only to giants like Google that have masses of computing power available.
Posted by: Vikram Aggarwal | Monday, October 31, 2005 at 04:41 PM
Is riya dead? or are they still working on it?
Posted by: Paul | Tuesday, September 11, 2007 at 01:37 PM