Web 2.0 Wonders: Riya Photo Search

Riya will recognize human faces and text within photographs

JavaScriptSearch
Wednesday, March 22, 2006; 01:48 AM

The Riya Photo Search launched its public beta.  It is now accepting requests for invites.  The face-recognition service allows for searches within photos and it auto-tags collections, according to who is shown on the picture.

The technology does require some user input.  The so called "training" process involves dragging-and-dropping around faces and categories , until Riya is ready to identify people.  Alternatively, you can skip that by importing training sets from your contacts on Riya.

In order to create your own photo collection on Riya, you need to sign up and upload pictures with a Riya client program. The user has control over privacy settings and uploaded folders. There is an upload progress bars. Photos with faces and text are auto-rotated into a proper position, resized to 800 x 600 resolution, the faces are then detected and metadata is generated.