Search for people and faces inside videos using VideoSurf

Posted on October 17, 2008 at 5:42 am

Last week I discovered that Picasa came out with an awesome new feature whereby it can now find all the faces of people in your pictures and then find more pictures of the same person using facial recognition and comparison technology. It’s basically the end of having to write descriptions or add keywords and tags to your photos!

All you have to do in Picasa is find a couple of pictures of one person, tell Picasa who that person is, and it will automatically find that persons’ face in all of your other pictures! After playing around with it for a few hours, I was able to quickly find 2000+ pictures of myself! Nice! You can also search pictures on the web by using Windows Live Search facial recognition filters.

The same technology is now being applied to videos and there are many companies working on ways to detect faces inside videos, which would greatly increase the completeness and usefulness of search results. For example, when I searched Picasa for my name earlier, I would get only pictures that were tagged with my name.

Now I get pictures of myself where I am only one person out of a group of 10 that I never bothered to tag.

VideoSurf is a new and better way to search, find and watch videos online. Using some cool new technology, VideoSurf has written a program that can “see” into a video and find content in a fast and efficient manner. It can provide more relevant results by indexing now only text, but also searching using visual identification.

Using visual search makes it much easier to navigate millions of videos to find specific scenes, people, places, or moments that you want to watch.

For example, if you search for “Bill Gates”, you’ll get a large list of videos about Bill Gates:

Across the top, you’ll see a bar that shows Everyone, then the person you searched for, and then other people who are somehow connected to Bill Gates either by being in the same video or something else, I’m not 100% sure.

You can click on Bill Gates to see only videos with Bill Gates in them and you can also check the box “Show only faces” which will show you previews of the video on the right with just the faces. You can click on any of them to skip to that part of the video.

What’s even cooler is that there are radio buttons on each video as you can see above that has “Best”, “All”, or “Bill Gates”. Right now I’m seeing all faces, regardless of who it is, but I can change it so that I only see his face in the video previews:

As you can see, it removed the face of Jerry Seinfeld from the Microsoft commercial, but it did not completely remove Steve Jobs. I guess it’s not perfect! It’s still in beta, but does a remarkably great job at finding what I am looking for. It also ranks the videos by visual relevancy, so the videos with more of his face should show up higher.

The other nice feature is that it indexes video from many online video sources, including YouTube, Metacafe, DailyMotion, Revver, Google Video, MSN video, CNN Video, MSBNC, Fox News, and lots more.

It’s only a start and not something that’s going to shake up the world, but it’s definitely going in that direction slowly. As the technology is improved, we’ll be seeing video search and audio search from Google itself!

Another cool program called Photology allows you to search your pictures by color, time of day, location, and features. Enjoy!

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One Response to “Search for people and faces inside videos using VideoSurf”

Search for spoken words inside a YouTube video using Google Audio Indexing Says:

[...] check out my other post on VideoSurf, a cool online service you can use to search for people and faces inside videos. Ben Carigtan writes about websites, technology, computers and how to get the best out of them. [...]
November 10th, 2008 at 5:23 am