[danielbigham]

A question for you folks...

I'm working on a photo app and one feature that I'd like to add is facial recognition so that photos can be automatically tagged with the people that are in them.

There are two ways to implement this:

1. Do the facial recognition on the device
2. Do the facial recognition on a server

While there are ways to do #1, my sense is that open source libraries aren't all that easy to use for this task, and probably don't provide very accurate results without a lot of effort.

So, I'm considering #2. Apparently there are now high quality face recognition APIs, such as Face++: Leading Face Recognition on Cloud.

But there are a couple serious downsides to #2:

1. The thought of your photos being uploaded to a server is perhaps creepy. (?)
2. Bandwidth use.

#1 is probably mostly a concern in the sense that if you have the app configured to automatically do facial recognition on all photos, then any picture you take is going to get uploaded to a server some place.

#2 could be mitigated by having a feature to only upload when in Wi-Fi?

My question for you folks is this: If you were considering a photo app that advertised high quality facial recognition / tagging as one of its features, would it be problematic if that was done via an API like Face++: Leading Face Recognition on Cloud Would you configure the app to do it automatically in the background for all photos? Or would pick and choose which photos you wanted to do facial recognition on?

Or, do you have any other thoughts/comments on this subject.

Thanks!
Daniel

[pkcable]

I would be uncomfortable with an app doing it in the background. I would want to be able to pick and choose, for the very privacy concerns you site. . That being said it's an interesting app idea!

[John Vieira]

I would prefer on device if possible.

And there can be manual tagging.

Automatic face scanning is nice if possible, but manual is fine too.

Posted via Z69