My product idea is supposed to help the user at the last stage of a trip or holiday; being back home. It is to support the processing and organising of private photos taken on the holiday. Having taken hundreds of pictures on the holiday or trip, probably everyone goes through their photos reminiscing about captured memories and attempting to organise them, you often comes across the situation where, weeks later, you can’t remember who or what the picture was taken of. One keeps asking again “what was that again?” or “what was the name of that church?”. The same questions can be asked about people you have met, fellow travellers, a couple with the same taste or maybe a lovely summer romance. Often you forget to exchange phone numbers, contact details and even names or you lost the paper it was written on, lost the phone the number was saved in. All those things happen on a regular basis and can be simply solved with my concept idea.
The software, in the form of a standard smart phone application that can be downloaded directly on your phone, can be used for two different purposes and involves different kind of technologies. One part of the application is object recognition providing the user with a sort of ‘tag’. When you take your photo, the mobile phone automatically saves the location coordinates and can later tell you again where your picture was taken. The software will then refer to Google maps checking the coordinates for anything remotely interesting within the area of where the pictures have been taken. In many cases Google maps can also provide the user with valid information on the sight, opening times and other tourist information, given Google maps has information saved as this is not a direct part of the software. Similar to object recognition the application uses face recognition software to identify people displayed on the tourists photo. The application analyses the picture taken using face recognition software and after the data is saved, it transfers you with social networks comparing the biometric results of your photo with all different profile picture of people registered in social networks. It is impossible for the software to find the exact same person but narrows down the number to about ten to twenty people, helping to find the person you’re looking for, enabling you to reconnect with those people.
There are already similar applications available or patent registered in both cases. There are for example various applications that deal with object recognition, but only work by pointing your smart phone camera towards the object. If for example you point your phone towards the Eiffel tower, the application will tell you that it is the Eiffel tower, how high it is, admission prices etc (mashable.com). Equivalently many face recognition software’s are used my different applications that can after one manual tag, re-recognise a person. I have used those ideas and technologies to go a bit further and add to them. As mentioned earlier my main focus is on the situations weeks after a trip, so it is necessary for the application to work on photos already taken, also Apple appears to be working on different facial recognition applications (Mac1.no). In the case of the facial recognition it not only helps you identify the person, but goes a step further and combining face recognition soft wares with the current hype of social networks, allowing the user to contact that person via for example Facebook. (unwiredview.com)
Sadly I had to learn after various researches on the web, that technology isn’t quite as advanced as I would like it be, especially on the area of face recognition. The concept would face several issues, including privacy issues, which can be disputed as I personally think, that if someone who wants to remain totally private shouldn’t register on Facebook exposing photos and personal information. I will touch on that matter in the ‘Technologies used’ section further down.
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