Picasa Web Albums Adds Face Recognition, Map Game

One of the best innovations from Google...Awesome

 

Picasa Web Albums Adds Face Recognition, Map Game

via Google Blogoscoped by Philipp Lenssen on 9/3/08

The Picasa desktop client has been released in version 3 with some changes, and Picasa Web Albums also saw a revamp with new features. For instance, there's now an Explore tag which lets you visually discover new pics by others.

An interesting new feature is Picasa's face recognition. Google acquired image recognition company Neven Vision a while ago, and now Picasa got some of that technology, too*. Get started by logging in to Picasa Web Albums and clicking the "Try it" button below the Name Tags headline to the right. This will trigger a job with a progress bar, and you can check back a while later. (At first, none of my test photos seemed to yield matches, but today I'm getting some results.)

Once faces are found, you can switch to the People tab and tag them with names. In my test photos I tagged Matt Cutts, Sergey Brin and others. I then uploaded more photos containing these persons. Google did not automatically tag them; what they do is find the rectangle within the photo containing a face, and then offer suggestions (sometimes correct, sometimes incorrect), so you'll end up semi-manually identifying the remaining faces. All in all a useful feature as this lets you group and find your photos by the persons in them, but it would become even more useful if Google were able to automatically assign matches.

Another addition to Picasa Web Albums is a game called "Where in the World?". Here your job is to try to guess where a given snapshot was taken by clicking on a world map. You'll then see the distance to the actual location and get more points the closer your pick. The game looks neat but it would probably be more fun if they'd more often show you pictures for which there's a realistic chance to know the location (e.g. a picture of a famous monument versus a picture of a more general shore scenery). I wonder if Google has any intentions to get back some data for their AI to mine here, but considering the game already knows the location of each given picture, I'm not so sure.

[Thanks Hebbet!]

*Since some time, Google image results can also be restricted to show just faces.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Picasa Web Albums Adds Face Recognition, Map ... | Comments]

File format demysified

Cross platform developers often encounters some problem with file-formats at some point.This article may give them some clue regarding how to procede.
 Unix/dos file formats is determined by the type of end-of-line (EOL)
markers used in text files. Unfortunately,different operating system use different tokens to represent the end of a line of text in a file. For example, the usual line ending token used by software on the Windows platform is a pair of ASCII control characters—carriage return
(CR) and line feed (LF). Unix software, however, just uses the LF character to denote the end of a
line.

Not all of the various tools on these operating systems are prepared to understand files that contain line endings in a format that differs from the native line ending style of the operating system on which they are running. Common results are that Unix programs treat the CR character present in Windows files as a regular character (usually rendered as ^M), and that Windows programs combine all of the lines of a Unix file into one giant line because
no carriage return-linefeed (or CRLF) character combination was found to denote the end of
line.

To convert from dos file system to unix ,use dos2unix utility .For reverse conversion use unix2dos

For recursive conversions use the following one liner in most linux platforms

find . -type f \! -exec dos2unix {} \;

execute this from the top level directory. This will do it recursively in all sub folders.