Riya: It’s Like Flickr on Steroids
CNET has a video from Demo 2006, where the creators of Riya were demonstrating their web-based photo service. Riya can recognize faces and read text in photographs, which makes tagging and searching so much easier.
At one point, he had the software look for pictures of him and his son. It brought up a picture of what looked like just him, but there was a photo of his son on the wall behind him. The software only needs a facial image of 10 pixels to recognize a face, so pictures with 5 or 8 megapixels will provide far more detail than Riya needs to classify your photographs.
Additionally, it will tag items with the same date with some of the same words that it recognizes. He searched for photos with his son and the word Hawaii and it brought up a beautiful ocean scene. “How did it know that it was Hawaii?†On the same day, he had taken a picture of the Avis car rental sign that said the state, Hawaii. It correctly classified the photo as taken in Hawaii.
This web-based service is an advertising business model, so they will earn money selling advertising to companies that want their advertisements next to pictures of corresponding pictures. He used the example of pictures of the Boston Marathon and advertisements for running shoes.
I have been reluctant to use services like Flickr because I’m so greedy about the ownership of my pictures. It hasn’t really been the chore of tagging that has kept me away. I’m interested in seeing if Riya is able to catch the hearts of the photo-philes as much as Flickr has or if it’s a complicated toy that needs too much training to be useful.
Via: ::HorsePigCow:: life uncommon: CNet does a demo of Riya