7 Replies Latest reply: Oct 26, 2014 5:15 AM by Andrea417 RSS

    Problems with Face Recognition

    bgelfand Community Member

      I see others are having this problem.

       

      I am using Photoshop Elements 8 on an i7-860 based machine with 8 gigabytes of RAM running Windows 7 x64, with all the latest patches applied.

       

      When I first started using face recognition, it worked well. As I added more and more photos of the same people, it stopped recognizing their faces. It recognizes that there is a face in the photo, and even suggests names, but never the name of the person.

       

      I have many pictures of two children and considerably fewer of their parents. When the girl is shown, face recognition suggests her father's name, but never her name. She looks very much like her father. It seems that the more pictures of a person the less likely the program is to recognize them; just the opposite of what one would expect.

       

      I optimized the catalog and re-indexed the recognition data, all to no avail.

       

      My question, and the reason for this post: as a work around, is there any way to delete some of the photos from face recognition without deleting the tags on the photos?  Clicking on the tag for the person, then clicking on "Find more items with ..." , and selecting the "Confirmed" tab will show all the items face recognition knows is that person. If I click on the thumbnail it will "X" them. But will this also delete the tag on the photo? I have spent too much time tagging photos to want to experiment with my live catalog. Has any tried this on a test machine?

       

      I have mixed black and white and color images cataloged. Will this "confuse" facial recognition? In other words does facial recognition use color as a parameter, or does it simply measure facial features and ignore color?

        • 1. Re: Problems with Face Recognition
          johnrellis CommunityMVP

          An Adobe employee posting on one of the forums has acknowledge that there is a bug in the face recognition that causes recognition to stop working after too many instances of a person are identified.  The only workaround I know of is to introduce a new tag (e.g. "Jane Doe 2") and start recognition all over for that person.  See this FAQ for details and drawbacks of the workaround:

           

          http://www.johnrellis.com/psedbtool/photoshop-elements-faq.htm#_Face_recognition_stops

          • 2. Re: Problems with Face Recognition
            rganong Community Member

            Another alternative is to try a free program for Win and Mac called Fotobounce.  Fotobounce does face detection and recognition, photo organizing, interfacing to Facebook, and the next release will do peer to peer sharing of your photos to avoid using a public website or email to transfer full resolution photos between friends and family.

            • 3. Re: Problems with Face Recognition
              Barbara B. CommunityMVP
              there is a bug in the face recognition that causes recognition to stop working after too many instances of a person are identified.

              Unfortunately, I think this may be a bug in the technology itself rather than just in Adobe's implementation of it, since the same thing happens in iphoto, too.

              • 4. Re: Problems with Face Recognition
                johnrellis CommunityMVP

                I believe the issue is in the way the technology is applied.  As more and more diverse instances of a face get identified as person X, the attributes of those faces get added into the entire pile of statistical attributes for X, diluting or averaging out those attributes that distinguish X from other faces.  This is a not uncommon problem with machine-learning algorithms.  One way to fix it is to ask the user to identify a "training set" of typical instances of a face, which then becomes fixed in size and is used to recognize the rest of the instances (this would make the user interface a little more complicatd). Another way is to use learning algorithms that are less susceptible to such dilution.

                • 5. Re: Problems with Face Recognition
                  Barbara B. CommunityMVP

                  Yes, that's logical, John. Very plausible explanation.

                  • 6. Re: Problems with Face Recognition
                    ~V Adobe Employee

                    People recognition works with my grey scale images. Though I am not too sure about if it auto suggests me when i have the face of same person in both colored and grey.

                     

                    ~V

                    • 7. Re: Problems with Face Recognition
                      Andrea417

                      You said the next release of Fotobounce will allow peer to peer sharing.  Does this mean software to software?  I love the organizer features of Adobe, but hate the facial recognition.  I would dearly love to utilize another software for the facial recognition and then import them in to Adobe.  The problem I have found is although you have the people tags in one photo, the next software completely ignores them.  I've also noticed there is no metadata field to store the location (x,y) of where the person is tagged within the photo.

                       

                      Any suggestions of alternate facial recognition would be MUCH appreciated!

                       

                      Thank you,

                       

                      Andrea417