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Google’s acquisition of face recognition technology from Neven Vision is finally implemented on Google Images (unofficially). You’ll be able to restrict image search results to just face or news with decent accuracy.

Since it is unofficial, there is no straight cut way to include the restriction, you’ll have to add any one of the following parameters at the end of the image search URL (ignore the text inside square brackets):

  • imgtype=face [for faces]
  • imgtype=news [for news]

For example, searching for “Dell” will show up Dell computers and their logo, whereas if you add “imgtype=face” at the end of the existing URL, you’ll just find Michael Dell along with other people (no logos, no computers) and the results incredibly accurate. I could just spot one non-face result out of 18 results (94.4% accuracy for “Dell“).The below screenshot compares both set of results:

Google_images_face 

Now that the feature fully functional, I think it won’t take long before Google officially implements this feature inside Google Image Search. Impressive again!

Via Google Blogoscoped



6 Comments and Trackbacks (Add Your Own)

  1. I’ll definitely give this a try!

    Thanks for sharing Thilak.

  2. [...] Thilak writes on How to limit search results to faces or news with google image search [...]

  3. Visual Search engines are the future. Good finding

  4. Try this Greasemonkey Script to add image type selections to Google Image search.

  5. This technology has to evolve

  6. Excellent find. Image results are pretty accurate.

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