Topic: Initial Impressions of LR6 Face Recognition (Read 7879 times)

Chris Kern · « **on:** April 21, 2015, 07:15:40 pm »

Automatic face recognition isn't a feature I particularly care about — I've been manually keywording the people I want to be able to search on for years and it's not much of a burden — but I was really curious to see how well the Lightroom 6 (a.k.a., "CC") implementation worked. After an hour or so of playing with it:

I'm really impressed by how fast it "learns." It only needs a couple of good exemplars to begin making accurate guesses about additional faces.
The number of false positives is very low. This is important. You can tolerate misses (false negatives or regions that aren't recognized as a face), and in fact you should expect them, but misidentification of people requires a lot of manual checking to fix.
As expected, faces in profile typically won't be recognized. As far as I know, this is typical of face-recognition software. You need to identify these faces manually, and Adobe provides a fairly intuitive method for doing that.
I sometimes keyword people whose faces are barely visible, or aren't visible at all (e.g., back facing the camera), if their presence in the image may be a useful future search parameter. No way any face-recognition algorithm can do that; it's always going to be a manual process.

My only significant disappointment based on my initial experience is that once the identity of a face has been verified in one copy of an image, I wish that identification would be carried into other (virtual) copies. I think this should be possible, although there may be some constraint I'm not aware of.

All in all, I think Adobe did a pretty good job. While it may not be a feature of particular value to me (or many other Lu-La forum members, I suspect), I wouldn't be surprised if its presence will make Lightroom more attractive to casual snapshooters and, as a result, help expand the customer base.

dreed · « **Reply #1 on:** April 22, 2015, 05:35:06 am »

Can you comment on the CPU overhead of having it enabled?

citro · « **Reply #2 on:** April 22, 2015, 05:59:05 am »

What is your hardware ?

jrp · « **Reply #3 on:** April 22, 2015, 07:45:15 am »

It seems to take 100% of a single thread in the background.

Chris Kern · « **Reply #4 on:** April 22, 2015, 09:13:10 am »

Quote from: dreed on April 22, 2015, 05:35:06 am

Can you comment on the CPU overhead of having it enabled?

Quote from: citro on April 22, 2015, 05:59:05 am

What is your hardware ?

I'm running a "Late 2013 Mac Pro" with a six-core 3.5 GHz Xeon microprocessor and 64 GB of memory. As jrp pointed out, the face recognition is a background process. Its presence isn't noticeable on this machine. However, Adobe apparently had some concerns about overhead because LR6 has a new process control panel, which opens when you click on the Lr logotype in the upper-left corner of the (primary) application window, that allows you to suspend the execution of background tasks.

Geraldo Garcia · « **Reply #5 on:** April 22, 2015, 11:15:52 am »

Facial recognition was not on my wish list but I also gave it a try last night.
First I identified my wife on a folder of family photos, about 50 images and 20 or so with her face on. As Chris said, it learns quickly and after 5 or 6 manual entries LR was guessing quite accurately.
After that I moved to a serious challenge: A folder containing more than 1400 images of a parade with more than 8 faces (average) on each photo... including my wife on some. I started the process and went to dinner. One our later (I don't know exactly how long it took as I was away) it had identified 62 occurrences of her face and not a single one was wrong!
It is not very useful to me but it is quite accurate and fast.

digitaldog · « **Reply #6 on:** April 22, 2015, 01:55:06 pm »

Quote from: Geraldo Garcia on April 22, 2015, 11:15:52 am

Facial recognition was not on my wish list but I also gave it a try last night.

Mine either but I do like it a lot more now that I've tried it. It's also very entertaining to see what LR guesses as you add more face 'keywords' and it appears to learn. It even recognized some pictures of dogs and it's pretty funny when it mistakes people I know with a dog name or vise versa.

Anyway I'm working towards getting the entire catalog referenced this way. I made the mistake of picking All images. It bogs down big time. It appears to be more effective to work on a folder at a time, and from the bottom of the grid on up.

I was wrong about Face Detection based mainly on my own ignorance and not understanding how well Adobe would implement it into the Keyword pane. It will make searching far faster and easier.

digitaldog · « **Reply #7 on:** April 22, 2015, 02:07:25 pm »

The entertainment potential of Face Detection is almost worth the price of admission. Look what it found:

Yes, it's a waterless urinal

JimGoshorn · « **Reply #8 on:** April 22, 2015, 02:25:33 pm »

Yes, it is indeed entertaining. LR found faces in the hub of a power chair wheel, a mushroom, a luna moth on a tree, a hummingbird feeder hanging from a sheperds hook, some birds, some dogs, some fungus on a tree, in textures and in leaves.

Wonder what it would do with some images of Rorschach test cards?

Jim

digitaldog · « **Reply #9 on:** April 22, 2015, 02:30:16 pm »

I wish there were some 'quality' index for filtering. Some images do contain faces that are rather blurry and as such, I'd prefer not to keyword them, even if I do recognize who they are.

Jimmy D Uptain · « **Reply #10 on:** April 22, 2015, 03:28:35 pm »

Quote from: digitaldog on April 22, 2015, 02:07:25 pm

The entertainment potential of Face Detection is almost worth the price of admission. Look what it found:

Yes, it's a waterless urinal

My first chuckle from the intertubes today. Thanks!

Philmar · « **Reply #11 on:** April 22, 2015, 03:54:19 pm »

Quote from: Chris Kern on April 21, 2015, 07:15:40 pm

While it may not be a feature of particular value to me (or many other Lu-La forum members, I suspect), I wouldn't be surprised if its presence will make Lightroom more attractive to casual snapshooters and, as a result, help expand the customer base.

At first I considered this to be a useless gimmick.

But I suppose when dementia sets in and I am having difficulty remembering friends, family and faces I just may find a use for this.

digitaldog · « **Reply #12 on:** April 22, 2015, 04:18:46 pm »

Quote from: Philmar on April 22, 2015, 03:54:19 pm

At first I considered this to be a useless gimmick.

No more than keyword IMHO. And that's how LR treats them. If anyone uses Keywords and finds them useful for locating images, I suspect they will find the same true once the use the new feature. I'm not tagging all images found, but one's I feel are important to locate in the future.

I've learned a few tricks. If things bog down, you can quit and start where you left off, it seems to help. So you can search the entire catalog, produce the results in the grid, do some work, quit and restart where you left off later.
It's pretty interesting to see the product 'learn' as you go, grouping images correctly guessed with a ?. Select them and click on the little Accept icon.
If you have a group of images that are correctly guessed and a few that are not, select them all, click on the accept icon on one thumbnail that IS correct, the others take on that correct keyword.
Deleting images that are of no interest in tagging helps. The actual Delete Key seems a bit faster than the little reject icon, not sure why.
The "Sort By" option near the Film Strip is useful and toggling differing options can preset to you, images that are easier to select all at once.

Sheldon N · « **Reply #13 on:** April 23, 2015, 12:20:20 am »

Any idea how to change the default icon for a person in the People tab? It seems like the first image you tag of a person becomes their thumbnail icon for them as a person going forward. I'd like to be able to select a more flattering photo as their default icon, and also be able to change it as time goes on.

One thing I am impressed by is its ability to track with a person as they change in appearance. I've been applying it to my existing catalog with family photos, and it does a good job of keeping up with my kids' appearance as they grow up (my catalog goes back about a decade).

Rhossydd · « **Reply #14 on:** April 23, 2015, 04:43:14 am »

I think the any value of this will become apparent in time once we see how it deals with imports and if theer are any perfromance hits as a result of it's use.

I'm a little surprised that the feature seems unable to reference any existing keywords to make suggestions. A trick missed there.

I was also hoping for a more wide reaching recognition feature as someone here thought possible. Looking for predominate colours, shapes, features etc. Maybe that will added in future.

ihv · « **Reply #15 on:** April 23, 2015, 05:07:21 am »

Not the feature I was missing but indeed, seems to work decently well.

Rhossydd · « **Reply #16 on:** April 23, 2015, 05:29:06 am »

The only other programme's FR feature I've tried is Picassa and LR6 is doing as well as that did.
Yes, lots of false positives, so some work needed to make sure it's recognising faces correctly.
What's unclear at the moment is, if, or how much, it learns as you add more positives to improve recognition of specific individuals. Also are there any specific ways to help it to learn ?
If it does learn with more samples, some effort put in when first setting the system up will pay dividends later in continuing use.

Difficult to judge, but I think it may have been more accurate on the last folders I ran through it compared to the first*, but it may be my familiarity with how to work faster with it now too.

*I've run 30k images through it so far.

sat968 · « **Reply #17 on:** April 23, 2015, 11:14:08 am »

I'm in the process of running facial recognition on my catalog of ~17K images. It took about 24 hours to complete the initial recognition processing on a 2010 MacBook Pro with an SSD. Now I'm in the process of confirming about 10K faces that LR couldn't positively identify.

One interesting aspect of this is that there are many familial mismatches so LR is in a sense able to tell which family members share similar facial features. (Of course my wife did not share my sense of amusement of LR thinking she was my son-in-law

).

The biggest issue I'm having is LR is just so frustratingly slow to update it's database when I confirm the name of face. It can easily take 10 seconds to confirm a single face, and if I attempt to group confirm, LR goes off for a minute and I'm just left with the spinning beachball.

I'm hoping that this will get better once I get all of the images tagged, but my fear is that LR just can't handle a large database of images and faces.

Scott

digitaldog · « **Reply #18 on:** April 23, 2015, 11:41:47 am »

Quote from: sat968 on April 23, 2015, 11:14:08 am

The biggest issue I'm having is LR is just so frustratingly slow to update it's database when I confirm the name of face. It can easily take 10 seconds to confirm a single face, and if I attempt to group confirm, LR goes off for a minute and I'm just left with the spinning beachball.

I didn't see that kind of slowdown. I did see operations slow down a bit and quitting then restarting seemed to help. My boot disk is SSD but the images and catalog all reside on an external drive, I'm working with a 2.7GHz i7 Macbook with 16GB of ram.
Maybe optimizing the catalog?

digitaldog · « **Reply #19 on:** April 23, 2015, 01:07:09 pm »

Trying to figure out how to 'force' detection of a folder after conducting FD in the first place. I tagged some but not all faces, now I want to go back and maybe do the rest.

Tried F1 (LR help) it takes me to Safari where no page is found. Ouch.

Author Topic: Initial Impressions of LR6 Face Recognition (Read 7879 times)