I recently discovered the “Faces” functionality on Apple’s Photos app—which is intended to replace iPhoto as the general photo management application on Mac OS.
The Faces function will automatically mark with a circle anything in an image that it recognizes as a human face. It seems to be very good at this, although it often misses a face if it isn’t facing the camera more or less straight on and upright.
I started goofing around with it and discovered, however, that Photos also seems to think that women’s bare breasts are human faces, even when only one breasts is showing.
So Photos seems to suffer from the common male foible of looking a woman in the chest.
While highlighting breasts might be considered a “feature”, I have found that Faces also tags tires, cupcakes and sometimes a random shaded part of a tree as a face.
And of course, there’s no way to turn off this “feature”. Thanks, Apple. for becoming more like Microsoft every day.
It’s my understanding that these types of face recognition software look for a pair of eyes as the first clue that “Hey, this might be a face” functionality.
A pair of boobies, especially one where there is a, er, darker area in the middle will trick the software.
Conversely, don’t photo-sharing apps often think they see boobies where there aren’t any, and refuse to allow the picture accordingly?
I seem to recall a case that got well-publicized a while back. Women in bath tub, mostly covered with bubble-bath suds, with part of arms and elbows sticking out. App thought elbow was a boob, and rejected the pic.
