By admin
10th February 2010.
10:16
One of the most requested things for me to show in a tutorial has been the face recognition feature of the X10. Over the years our mobile phones have often inherited new features from dedicated point&shoot cameras, things like face-detection, smile-shutter etc have been some of the latest.
In X10 this is taken one step further as the feature face recognition is added, a feature that as far as I know isn’t really that common in dedicated cameras. I would guess that is due to the fact that a dedicated camera is something you use to take pictures or shoot movies – period. You then watch the pictures in you computer, print them or show them online. This might be the reason why this feature is instead generally implemented in the application used to watch and store the pics, such as Google Picasa etc.
Mobile phones on the other hand are used in another way, I can of course only speak for myself but I keep all my pics in my phone while the pictures on the memory cards of my cameras always get deleted after I’ve copied them to my PCs or online storage.
This builds quite a big library of pics over time and getting the opportunity to automatically get them tagged to people in my phonebook really is a cool thing.
Face recognition hasn’t been around for that long, at least not in the consumer space. Picasa got it quite recently and I’ve played around quite a bit with it in that app. A word of warning here is that it’s a relatively new feature and it also seems like quite a hard task for a computer/phone to do.. so it fails from time to time. (I know this from experience from manually confirming thousands of pics of my daughter in Picasa 
)
I’ve of course tested the X10 quite a lot since I started using it. Whenever you shoot a pic and the phone detects a face it tries to match it to other tagged pics. If it finds a match it shows that name over the pic, if not it shows “Unknown”. This happens from time to time and sometimes it has also shown another persons name. That doesn’t seem to happen that often though – only happened to me a few times and that was quite a while ago on very early SW. However if this happens it’s easy to click the name or the “unknown”-tag and from there choose the right person to tag it with.
What this does in X10 is quite cool. Every contact in the contact view gets his/her own tab with pics of that person. And the other way around, albums for all your friends are automatically created among your albums in Mediascape. Both these can also be reached from clicking the infinte-button at various places such as on a contact-related event in Timescape or a photo in Mediascape. This really connects the Mediascape and Timescape applications and ties things together in a very nice way.
As usual this is done on prototype hardware and pre-release SW so things might change until launch when it comes to how it looks and behaves.
As a side note you’ll notice that I’ve now put my videocamera on the shelf in favor of the Sony Ericsson Vivaz, I’ll try to shoot all my tutorials from now on with the vivaz instead. So now every tutorial also in a stange meta-way is a sample video The clip is also directly uploaded to YouTube without editing so therefore the pay-off in the end promoting this blog is made in a more analog old-fashioned manner.. (remember to click “View on YouTube” and choose 720p to see it in HD)
