Tuyuan: A Facial Recognition SNS

Tuyuan is a new, Beijing-based social networking site that employs facial recognition technology to let users get connected with friends. Free accounts come with 1GB of space. Once users upload a photo and tag a person, the service automatically suggests other pictures it thinks the same person is in. The site’s facial recognition technology is still being developed, and searches should become more sophisticated over time.

SNS that purport to use facial recoginiton technology are nothing new - there’s been Riya (now focused on ecommerce via Like.com), Ookles (never launched), and Polar Rose (in private beta for nearly a year), among others. Most recently Tagcow came on the scene, but it turns out it uses humans to tag photos, which tends to produce bad data.

Late last year Washington-based Active Symbols, a company founded in 2003 to develop a visual search platform, released a demo called Eyealike to show off their facial recognition platform. The technology works by breaking faces down into elements, identifying common features like eyes, nose, and mouth. The platform then attempts to extract data on the orientation and shape of the face, the skin tone, and the color and texture of the hair. While the software, like Tuyuan’s, still needs perfecting, there will undoubtedly come a day in the not-too-distant future when instead of having to manually tag the faces of people in photos uploaded to sites like Facebook, users can rely on accurate site software to do it for them.

Image source: Tuyuan and Eyealike

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