Searching for People

Searching for People

Inside Redgate Software, someone posted a picture and was asking if anyone knew who the person was. In this case, there had been a conversation at an event, and a picture was taken, but our employee couldn’t remember the individual’s name to whom they’d spoken.

This happens a lot, especially to me. I’m really good with faces, and often remember what we talked about, but I’m horrible with names.

Someone suggested an image search, so I decided to give that a try and see what happened. For privacy reasons, I won’t put the person’s image here, but use mine instead.

Google Searches

Google will perform image searches, but it’s not doing facial recognition. They talk about that somewhere, but I’ve seen that listed a few times for privacy reasons. I took a picture of myself and decided to test this.

First, go to the Google home page. In the search area, you can see an icon, which lets you pick image search.

If you click this, you can upload an image.

I did that, and it clearly wasn’t looking for a person, but rather a shirt. My results are shopping oriented, and not good.

Of I change the focus, it’s still bad.

Supposedly it’s looking to match real images, not people, so I’ll give a photo I know is on the Internet. I know because I searched in Google for this image with text, and then screenshot’d it.

The initial focus was on Simon’s robe, but even changing this to me, it doesn’t find this picture.

Google isn’t great here. I think because it’s really looking for something to buy. Good if that’s your focus, less helpful here.

PimEyes

There are other engines. PimEyes is one. This is a paid service, but I uploaded my first picture, and saw these results:

I like that they’ve blurred out some of the others, and instead focused on me. These are all pictures of my, and if I paid, I assume they would have my name. If I scroll down a bit, I’ll see some URLs, like my blog site, which would help me figure out where to find this.

I only had 3 free searches, but this seemed to work well.

TinEye

TinEye is another engine. This one was less useful than Google.

FaceCheck.ID

I tried https://facecheck.id/, which made me feel like a Private Investigator. I had to agree to terms, meaning I won’t do this for nefarious purposes, and then also fill out a puzzle captcha.

My request was queued, as I’m guessing they only have so much compute that they share amongst people that want to the service. Once the search started, it was interesting. Face flying by my image.

When this was done, I get some great results. With rankings.

The lower ones clearly aren’t me, and the rankings are in the 60s, though the lower left ranks a 68 and that is me. The lower ones made me laugh a bit. Do I look like these?

Privacy Concerns and the Future

I don’t know where this will go, but more and more people are being captured in images and uploaded to the Internet. Even if you don’t do this yourself, if you go to public places, especially while traveling, who knows if someone taking their own photo will capture you and upload your image.

Certainly many governments and even private companies do this, though often their results aren’t uploaded to the public Internet. Not that they aren’t or that those images are safe, but hopefully those aren’t easily searchable.

I don’t know how we get around things, but I do like that lots of companies don’t want to allow AI bots to search their content and are limiting API access. I appreciate that in this case.

Conclusion

Looking for someone is interesting and I was surprised both how hard it was and how easy.

If you haven’t looked for yourself, give it a try. I wonder what you find.