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Windows Live Wave 4: Photo Gallery with Facial Recognition and Photo Fuse!

Mar 20, 2010 1:47 pm by damaster | 15 comments

Last month we gave you a glimpse of what’s to come for Windows Live Photo Gallery Wave 4. Having the chance to actually play with an early build of Photo Gallery today, we’ve discovered two brand new features that we haven’t told you about:

Face Recognition – Yes! You’ve heard it right, the long-awaited Face Recognition feature is coming to Photo Gallery! Not just face detection (which detects whether a face is in a photo or not), but Photo Gallery now automatically recognises who’s who in your photos! Both Face Detection and Face Recognition works silently in the background and scans through thousands of photos to let you select and add People tags to your photos. After you’ve tagged a few people in your photos, Photo Gallery will “remember” these people’s faces, as shown below:

When you add additional photos with those “remembered” people in it, Photo Gallery will automatically detect and recognise who these people are, and will ask you whether you “Agree” with the recognition results, as shown below:

Clicking on Agree will seamlessly add that People tag to the photo. Those faces that cannot be recognised (or you have never tagged them before) will still appear, and you will be able to “Identify” who they are just like in Wave 3. After several rounds of testing it seems like that the face recognition feature works quite well – and it hasn’t misrecognised anyone yet. Very impressive! Of course, the more you manually add People tags, the better Photo Gallery will “learn” their faces and deliver a better result!
Photo Fuse – In addition to Panorama stitching which as in Wave 3, another Microsoft Research project actualised into Photo Gallery – this time it’s Photo Fuse. According to Photo Gallery, Photo Fuse “creates a new photo from the best parts of similar photos”. Here’s how it works, you start by select a series of photos with the same background/taken at the same place. In the example below, the background is a cathedral, however I’m not happy with all the people walking across in front of the photos:

To get a clean photo of the cathedral, what you need to do is simply click the “Photo Fuse” button under “Create” tab on the ribbon, and you’ll be presented with the following selection window, as shown below:

You can then highlight the portion you’re not satisfied with (example applications include a person with eyes blinking, or powerlines across your photo), and select from the pop-up window the portion you prefer. You can do this to as many areas as you like, and Photo Gallery will automatically “fuse” that portion into the composite image you’re working on. After you’re satisfied with the result, click “Save”. The resulting image from the above example is shown below:

Pretty impressive eh?

These are just a few new features in the new Photo Gallery. When playing around, we’ve noticed quite a few nice enhancements that makes your photo editing and organisation much easier – one example would be a new time adjustment window which makes your life so much easier if your camera is set to the wrong time. We’ll keep digging for new nifty features, and remember, this is just an early build, and we’re already impressed! Stay tuned for more at LiveSide!

Update: You can check out a video of the Photo Fuse feature made by the team behind Microsoft Research by clicking here.

This entry was posted in News and tagged Photo Gallery, Wave 4, Windows Live. Bookmark the permalink.

BuciboLebo
These a very welcome and great features. I wonder if they have also implemented geotagging functionality.
- Damaster – LiveSide.net
  Yes they have. See this post for more information:
  http://www.liveside.net/main/archive/2010/02/22/windows-live-photo-gallery-wave-4-to-support-geo-tagging.aspx
  - BuciboLebo
    Thanks damaster for the referal. I have just also read about the OneAlbum feature demoed by MS Research, wow thats beautiful and sounds like its ready for prime time but yeah I know, they can be very slow with regards to letting ideas out in the wild as products. I hope they dont let in hang until it dont excite anymore or until others catch up like is soon likely to be the case with Surface and Courier.
BuciboLebo
And BTW, I would still like to be able to login at this site using my Windows Live ID.
- Mario Albertico
  I’m right there with you…
Mario Albertico
Wow, Photo Fuse looks really impressive! They’re definitely going to need Kylie to come back to show off these new features in some new ads.
hermanog
Is Photo Fuse a reincarnation of Group Shot?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_Shot
- Damaster – LiveSide.net
  Certainly looks like it!
BuciboLebo
Does anyone know if there is Windows 7 Libraries integration. That would be usefull for some of us who store our photos in Windows Home Server.
- Damaster – LiveSide.net
  Yes. Windows 7 Libraries is integrated. Whatever you add to any folders in the Library is included, and you can also access the “Add folders to library” menu directly from WL Photo Gallery.
http://twitter.com/Insomniac86 Aaron Harvey
I can’t wait to use the Geo-tagging with Windows Mobile 7 :D
And if Face Recognition works, its gonna be awesome! About time Microsoft caught up!
pdj
I got a chance to play with Live Gallery but I was unable to see anything that deals with face recognition, I saw the “People” tab and I was able to easily search pictures by people in them, however the program didnt actually look for people.
- Damaster – LiveSide.net
  Yes, Face Recognition is like face detection – it runs silently in the background – if there’s a face in your photos, it’ll recognise it and let you know, and if it can’t find a face, nothing will happen. You won’t find a button on the ribbon saying “Recognise Face”.
  Tag a dozen or so faces in your existing photos, then add some more photos that has the same people in it. Wait while it recognises in the background, and watch the magic happen. All you’ll find is the the text “Person’s Name? – Agree” under People tags if it has recognised someone. If it has found a face but not recognised it, it will say “Person found – Identify” instead.
helmet0628
Sure it give yous a suggestions on who is in the photo but they need to clean this up. They need a spot where faces are recognized and you can just mass select if its that person. Currently you have to open each photo and say you agree. I know its only a Beta so hopefully this will be cleaned up. Also its not as clean to access your tags as the previous button you have to use the ribbon and type and the tag you cant just select the tag from the main menu.
- Damaster – LiveSide.net
  Not sure if this is what you’re after, but if you have the Info Pane enabled in Gallery mode – you won’t need to open each photo before you click Agree for the face recognition. =) And I agree the old way of finding tags is much quickier and requires less clicks – although the new method allow you to have multiple criterion at the same time. Much work is needed, but hey, this is only M2 build (not even Beta)!