ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Facebook AI Lumos Can Find Your Photos Even Those You Are Not Tagged In.
If you type your name, for example, to trigger a Facebook photo search, results will start pulling images that you are not tagged in but contain your face. The same is true for searched things such as food and even actions.
Facebook is now able to do this by weaning itself away from text-driven technology. This means that the company is no longer relying solely on tags, labels, and descriptions that users enter into the system. The downside of this old method is that those photos that are not sufficiently tagged and captioned will not surface when searched.
“That’s changing because we’ve pushed computer vision to the next stage with the goal of understanding images at the pixel level,” Facebook said in an official statement. “This helps our systems do things like recognize what’s in an image, what type of scene it is, if it’s a well-known landmark, and so on.”
At the heart of this initiative is Facebook’s proprietary AI called Lumos. The company’s engineers are developing and training it so it can better answer questions involving the elements and objects found in an image.
The AI technology draws from its deep-learning engine so it can attach more meaning to each photo in the Facebook system. The analogy is that Facebook’s new technology can “see” the images as opposed to merely crawl their descriptions so that users can quickly find images even if they forgot their details.
Lumos’s power can be demonstrated in the way it can process billions of photos to predict a set of concepts and recognize semantic meaning. As the tool rolls out, users can expect its impact on the way search image results are ranked.
Even desktop-based photo software is good enough at this stuff to save me hours and hours each year in time I don’t have to spend doing the dreary work of keeping everything organized. It isn’t perfect, but it’s probably cut my workload by 85-90%.
Facebook promises to do an even better job — but you have to be willing to trust Facebook with your photos and your data.