Facelook

FaceLook is a social networking face recognition App. Meeting friends or followers and having a hard time remembering what were their names? Just photograph them and FaceLook will identify them for you.

1. Log into your Facebook account
2. Take a photo of a friend
Then, FaceLook matches the photo to your friends’ photos, and tells you who this friend is
Step 3 – Share it on your/their Wall
Unlike other face recognition services, you don’t need to manually teach FaceLook. FaceLook learns by itself from Facebook. However, when photographing, be sure the conditions are ideal. In some cases, Facelook couldn’t identify the person in the picture for us. The matches are made using your friends’ Facebook photos.

Download Facelook (1.99$)

Fun Face

Fan Face offers soccer fans a cool way of supporting national teams. You can easily put colorful makeup, flags, wigs, scarfs, glasses and other accessories on your own photos, friend’s photos, and group shots.
The app also let’s you to share and show off your fan photos on Facebook, Twitter or via E-mail. Applying makeup is easy, fast and fun. You can Pinch and adjust your makeup or have it done fully automatically.

Download Fun Face for Free

Full Version

About Face.com

Face.com develops face recognition technology. Two of its main applications run on facebook – PhotoTagger, which automatically tags your facebook friends, and Photo Finder, which finds lost photos of friends.

After scanning billions of photos and tagging over 50 million users through Photo Tagger and Photo Finder on Facebook, the company is moving ahead with its goal of making face recognition approachable and available to all.

The new API,which is still in open alpha stage, lets external developers tap into Face.com’s face detection and face recognition through simple REST API calls. If you’re looking to build a photo tagging application, create personalized e-cards or campaigns, or any other sci-fi idea that comes to mind, you can now use Face.com’s platform for that purpose. Facebook users would eventually be able to identify images of themselves and friends as they browse any website.

Face.com develops face recognition technology. Two of its main applications run on facebook – PhotoTagger, which automatically tags your facebook friends, and Photo Finder, which finds lost photos of friends.

After scanning billions of photos and tagging over 50 million users through Photo Tagger and Photo Finder on Facebook, the company is moving ahead with its goal of making face recognition approachable and available to all.

The new API,which is still in open alpha stage, lets external developers tap into Face.com’s face detection and face recognition through simple REST API calls. If you’re looking to build a photo tagging application, create personalized e-cards or campaigns, or any other sci-fi idea that comes to mind, you can now use Face.com’s platform for that purpose. Facebook users would eventually be able to identify images of themselves and friends as they browse any website.

Face.com introduced a few examples to show how the API can be used.

Tagger Widget – Using face.com’s Javascript Tagger Widget to quickly add a tagging experience

Poster Yourself – Using the API to automatically plug friend faces into posters and e-cards

CelebrityFindr – A full fledged mini site that uses face recognition to search and filter out Celebrity photos

David Sifry, developer and founder of Technorati, got an early look at The new API and said: “I’ve been impressed with Face.com’s API, and their plan for working closely with developers to build great applications that incorporate face detection and face recognition. Open platforms like this one will enable the creation of exciting new applications that we’ve never seen before at scale.”

In order to get started and start generating API calls, developers need to sign up. You can read more on Face.com’s new API.

Read more about Face.com on Thewadi’s company index.

Earlier this month, at TechFest 2010, Microsoft demonstrated a neat prototype that was designed to solve this problem. Microsoft OneAlbum  is a project that uses face-recognition and event-matching technology to automatically retrieve photos that would be of interest to you from social  networks and your friends’ online photo albums—and add them to  yours.

OneAlbum uses face-recognition technology to search for photos  featuring you and your friends with whom you are often  photographed.

How does it work? OneAlbum scans faces that appear frequently on  your OneAlbum Live photo collection and then scours your social  networks (Facebook, Windows Live, Flickr etc) for more photos of those people. When it’s finished, you will see all the new pics in your  OneAlbum collection with links to the sites they were published on.

While the face-recognition algorithms were developed by Microsoft Research Asia, OneAlbum is the brainchild of researchers from Microsoft’s Israel Innovation Labs.

The technology redefines the concept of “my album” from referring to “photos I have taken” to “photos that interest me,” no matter where they might reside. “This,” said Eyal Krupka, principal research program manager for the Israel Innovation Labs, “includes photos of myself, my wife, and my kids, from the events I participate in, the places I like, and more. OneAlbum also goes further, by organizing ‘my album’—the photos from the same event are presented side-by-side, no matter where they come from.”

Krupka said that OneAlbum could be used to spark “after-party social interaction.” since it also looks for photos from specific events. Of course, Facebook already does this quite effectively. Here’s a video demonstration with Krupka.

OneAlbum resembles another technology developed in Israel, Face.com. Here’s our latest update on Face.com. While both technologies scour social networks after untagged photos, Face.com PhotoTagger is available only on Facebook. On the other hand, OneAlbum forces you to use OneAlbum, although it scours more social networks than Face.com. When examining the privacy aspects, it seems privacy advocates won’t be pleased from either one.

More in the company index: Face.com and Microsoft Israel R&D Center.

Any user of their application, called Photo Tagger, can set email or Facebook notification when a new photo of his appears on one of his friends’ albums. In many cases, people mass-upload photos from trips, parties or any other gatherings, but don’t take the time to tag them immediately, or not tag them at all.

Face.com’s new feature fills in this gap by scanning new albums and using its face recognition technology to identify new images.

The main use isn’t in tagging photos, but rather removing them, or preventing the tagging. Many colege kids enjoy fooling around in parties but are embarrassed in the morning after. This feature allows a quick interception of embarrassing photos, before they are tagged – before the person is publicly mocked.

Photo Tagger was in an Alpha stage up to now, and this feature is the highlight of its opening to the public. Face.com checked out their application with the help of over 30,000 testers.

The face recognition technology has been praised all over and received high scores for its accuracy. However, this accuracy also raised concerns over privacy – automatic identification isn’t desired by everybody.