P: Please add face recognition to Lightroom (ability to specify region metadata)

I have Lightroom 3 (for about a year) and just recently downloaded the Lightroom 4 beta. All excited to try Lr4, I was floored that there is no facial recognition. Floored. This is Adobe, right? In my mind, this is a no-brainer to have in the Lr suite.

I just recently digitized (scanned) photos of my extended family (pre-digital) - I have thousands and thousands of photos to attempt to catalogue, and then eventually post-process. Facial recognition would certainly simplify, and shorten the time involved - as none of these photos have any metadata.

Picasa and Aperture both have facial recogntion. I've not tried the Aperture - but was impressed how well Picasa was able to match faces - independent of the age of the person. I was impressed that it seemed to employ a learning algorithm - so it got smarter at making the right tag as it was told right or wrong. I think I will give Aperture a try too.

When it comes time with the Lr4 beta expires, and I have to ante up an upgrade fee, I am seriously considering moving to a different post-processing platform to one which includes facial recognition.

I very much hope and vote for Lr 4 to have this functionality.. Thanks 🙂

„adding it because everyone else is doing it” – It is quite improbable, that there is a relevant number of user, which are only asking for face recognition because of that.

User requirements can be very different. If you are working with a manageable amount of images and your workflow normally doesn’t confront you with an overcharging diversity, then it is understandable that you don’t have the same need for automated steps.

I’m managing about 300.000 images and some other things more. They all are as well part of design processes, but also material for many research projects. I can clearly say: there is not enough automatism for me! The many reliable classes and structures are automatically created, the less need for me to spend my time with stupid classifications. And you’ll surely understand that classes and keywords are a must in such a large database.

The similarity search has the potential to reduce the manual work. Face recognition is just a subset of the general similarity search and for a lot of users like me a great thing. I would like even more than that, automated classes like: human, man, woman, diverse ages and could imagine even many, many other like photo, canvas, drawing and so on...

I just hope that Adobe introduces as many reliable automated categorization features as possible. Especially for BRIDGE, because it accompanies all people using the Creative Suite.

Nobody would need to use them if not interested. Or do you currently feel forced to permanently read the complete Metadata? I'm sure, you just do it if you like.

„adding it because everyone else is doing it” – It is quite improbably, that there is a relevant number of user, which are only asking for face recognition because of that.

User requirements can be very different. If you are working with a manageable amount of images and your workflow normally doesn’t confront you with an overcharging diversity, then it is understandable that you don’t have the same need for automated steps.

I’m managing about 300.000 images and some other things more. They all are as well part of design processes, but also material for many research projects. I can clearly say: there is not enough automatism for me! The many reliable classes and structures are automatically created, the less need for me to spend my time with stupid classifications. And you’ll surely understand that classes and keywords are a must in such a large database.

The similarity search has the potential to reduce the manual work. Face recognition is just a subset of the general similarity search and for a lot of users like me a great thing. I would like even more than that, automated classes like: human, man, woman, diverse ages and could imagine even many, many other like photo, canvas, drawing and so on...

I just hope that Adobe introduces as many reliable automated categorization features as possible. Especially for BRIDGE, because it accompanies all people using the Creative Suite.

Nobody would need to use them if not interested. Or do you currently feel forced to permanently read the complete Metadata? I'm sure, you just do it if you like.

I have read some of these comments and it is not completely connecting with me on how this will help my workflow if it is added.. unless it is added correctly and preferably even goes beyond facial recognition but object recognition.. as it is not just portrait photographers like myself using it.. but for a variety of image types where facial recognition by itself would not be too useful and if implemented I would want to be able to shut it off completely.

I HIGHLY disagree with one suggest of 'adding it because everyone else is doing it.. even if it doesn't work very well'. I trust Adobe will deliver good products.. I depend on their products to work well and not mess up my tagging or mis-tagging based purely on facial recognition. The last thing I need is Facebook like "Hey is this Gene Simmons in your photo?" or you have 239,234 photos in your library that have not yet been processed by facial recognition... would you like to do this now. It honestly becomes meaningless and a pain.

If something like this is added I would like to select a photo.. say "identify this item in the photo" tell the program it is a person or an object with potentially different algorithms if necessary. Then IF I would like it to identify and tag items I can choose which ones I want it to process like this.

Simply.. facial / object recognition is still an emerging technology at all levels from the phone to the super computer.. so unless it works well.. I don't need or want it part of my work flow... especially if I know who and what my items are already.

Christopher

In Bridge, face recognition would be very interesting too. All people which use the Creative Suite would benefit from this...

Adobe could easily create a solution where the software does find the person as pattern based on existing images, but doesn't automatically assign any names to it. A dialog would ask the user for correction and he would take the last decisions.

In fact this could be the same as our current work, just much much quicker.

In Bridge, face recognition would be very interesting too. All people which use the Creative Suite would benefit from this...

Adobe could easily create a solution where the software recognizes the person as pattern, but doesn't automatically assign any names to it. It would be the user itself which takes the last decision. And the software wouldn't collect person-specific information, it would just find persons based on already existing images and ask for further steps. The information it assigns could also be less "deeper" and permanent, but just keywords which can be easily deleted as usual.

In fact this could be the same as our current work, just much much quicker!

I'm also disappointent to here Tom's response. AFAIK most/all competitor applications do have a face/object recognition. This is not only something that a few people would profit from.
Yes, we can do all the keywording manually, but it is time consuming. It is much faster to add location metadata to photos (by multi-selection) than to keyword their content as usually within a series of photos we don't jump locations that often. But we certainly do have multiple and different contents within a series (e.g. different people). So functional support on this side (keywording, face recognition or similar) would help to save much much time - more time than e.g. using a map module.
So please, Lr-Team, take this feature request seriously and don't wait until you've found the 100% solution as until then many may have already switched to a different software. We really do want Lr to remain a great application also for large amount of photos.

I took a brief look at the implementation issues a while ago. I think a useful plugin needs the following components:

- A user interface that lets users view and modify the rectangular regions of where faces have been detected, view and modify the people tags associated with those regions, and confirm the faces that are automatically associated with tags. Windows Live Photo Gallery and Picasa are two examples of such non-trivial interfaces.

- Face detection: A module that detects the rectangular regions containing likely faces. Detecting faces reliably is well understood, and the OpenCV library has code that does it.

- Face recognition: A module that associates a face identified by face detection with the corresponding people tag. In a quick survey a while ago, I didn't find any well-established open-source library that does this well. The best libraries appear to be commercial or proprietary inside Google, Microsoft, and Apple. Anyone taking this on should be prepared to invest a lot in understanding the application of machine learning to get good results; as a counter-example, Photoshop Elements licensed a third-party face recognition library but botched its application (at least in PSE 8).

- Code for manipulating the XMP region metadata as defined by the Metadata Working Group (this is not supported by LR, or any other application at this point, as far as I know).

Right - you'd have to view it in a plugin dialog box, or a window of an external sidekick app. - still not good enough, right?

Hi Rob
the problem with that approach is that you won't get to visualize the tagged region in LR interface which is a big draw back