LAS VEGAS - Using facial recognition to tag people in photos is child's play for tech these days, with most photo sharing and social media sites detecting and offering to tag your friends automatically. Doing the same detection for videos is a bit more complicated, but AMD is on the case, showing off beta software that can help you organize and search your clips based on who is in them.
At AMD's CES 2015 suite, executive Richard Gayle demonstrated the application which has been tentatively named "AMD Content Manager," and its ability to find faces in a group of local videos he had stored. The upper left corner of the application showed a list of faces that it had detected in the video collection. Some of these faces had names already attached to them and others were marked as unknown. After clicking on the listing for a person named Darrell, Gayle was able to rename the person, add keyword tags to his profile and see the faces of people have been in videos with him.
He then dragged Darrell's icon and a few other people's icons into a search box, along with the keyword "amd." A single video, which contained all of those faces and was tagged AMD, appeared. But if there had been multiple videos that met that criteria, we would have seen them.
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When Gayle selected the video, a player opened in the right window pane, with a timeline and a list of face icons of people in the clip in the space below it. The timeline had different colored boxes to represent the moment in the video when each person first appeared. When he clicked on one of those boxes, the player jumped to that portion of the clip. This would be very useful if you have a 10 minute clip with lots of speakers, but you just want to see the 2 minutes in which your friend Susan appeared.
Gayle also said that the program allows you to do some basic editing, based on its facial recognition. For example, you could compile a montage of all of Darrell's appearances and save it as a single video.
AMD probably won't release Content Manager in its current form, Gayle said, but will instead seek to license it to OEMs who can rebrand it before putting it on their systems. He also said that only AMD chips offer the type of processing power necessary to run this application, because of the chips' HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) or ability to have the CPU, GPU and memory controller work closely together.
Whatever form it takes, this technology shows a lot of promise.
