Leveraging face recognition technology to find and organize photos

With digital still cameras, users can easily collect thousands of photos. We have created a photo management application with the goal of making photo organization and browsing simple and quick, even for very large collections. A particular concern is the manage-ment of photos depicting people. We present a semi-automatic approach designed to facilitate the task of labeling photos with people that opportunistically takes advantage of the strengths of current state-of-the-art technology in face detection and recognition. In particular, an accurate face detector is used to automatically extract faces from photos while the less accurate face recog-nizer is used not to classify the detected faces, but to sort faces by their similarity to a chosen model. The sorted faces are presented as candidates within a user interface designed for quick and easy face labeling. We present results of a simulation of the usage model that demonstrate the improved ease that is achieved by our method