New Algorithm Locates You Even In Untagged Photos
"Facebook has almost half a trillion photos, but a billion users - it's almost a 500 order of magnitude difference. Our algorithm is simply based on the number of tags, not on the number of photos, which makes it more efficient to search than standard approaches," said Aarabi.
Work on this project began in 2005 in Aarabi's Mobile Applications Lab, Canada's first lab space for mobile application development.
Currently the algorithm's interface is primarily for research, but Aarabi aims to see it incorporated on the back-end of large image databases or social networks.
"I envision the interface would be exactly like you use Facebook search-for users, nothing would change. They would just get better results," said Aarabi.
While testing the algorithm, Aarabi and Appel discovered an unforeseen application: a new way to generate maps.
They tagged a few photographs of buildings around the university campus and ran them through the system with a bunch of untagged campus photos.
"The result we got was of almost a pseudo-map of the campus from all these photos we had taken, which was very interesting," said Aarabi.
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