Facebook has added a useful new feature to their photo application, automatic face detection. In the past when you uploaded photos to Facebook you were required to manually draw a box around a person’s face and then tag their name to add them to the photo. A new algorithm now automatically detects faces in photos, all you have to do is click and tag. This is only a small improvement, but with 3 billion photos being uploaded to Facebook each month, it could amount to a huge amount of time saved.
The next logical step will be to add image recognition and auto tagging, which is a scary thought. Even if the technology is already available, I think most users would be too freaked out by a feature like this. It would also require a huge amount of processing power to run an image recognition and auto tagging script on every photo uploaded.
