Change in Behavior of Face Suggestions

jclay

I am using Tonfotos to organize thousands of family photos taken over the last 15 years. This means that I already have 2-3K of photos for each of my 3 children. For a couple of my children, the face recognition suggestions were remarkably accurate early in the sorting process. It would seem that Tonfotos might suggest 50 or so faces and I would review them and maybe 45 or more of them would be accurate and I could approve those photos in huge chunks. There were only a suggestion here or there that needed to be rejected. Recently, Tonfotos has been doing the opposite. Out of a 50 suggestions, maybe 45 or them are wrong and 5 are correct. I’m doing the opposite…marking all those wrong suggestions with "This is not “1st Child” becuase many of these incorrect suggestions are of other friends or family that I want to eventually put in their own folder. I could open each photo deal with each suggestion for each person in the photo. Let’s say I have wedding pictures where many photos are of only the bride and groom. When I have a 100 suggestions to approve for one person, it is far easier and faster to approve/reject those 100 suggestions for the bride and then go over to the groom’s folder and approve/reject the 100 suggestions for the groom. This is in contrast to opening each photo and making sure the bride and groom suggestions are correct. The “one at a time” is much more time consuming. Is this wrong…would you suggest opening each photo? I’m thinking if I reject a photo by marking it “This is not 1st child”…the program will hopefully present that same suggestion to the correct folder the next time.

I wondered if some type of “user error” has confused the program. I’ve even started to go back through my children’s album to see if I have given the program wrong information…i.e. approved faces that actually were not my children. The problem is that the program does not seem to be learning as I reject face suggestions for my children. I’ll reject a 50 face suggestions that are incorrect and the program quickly suggests 50 more faces with roughly another 45 of them incorrect. I keep attempting to reject the wrong faces but the program’s behavior doesn’t seem to be improving.

One other bit of info. Tonfotos is still in the process of importing a LARGE amount of photos. Could the performance of the face recognition feature be degraded since the program’s resources are being used greatly in the import process? Should I just stop trying to review face suggestions until all my photos have been imported/scanned and the face recognition is complete (might be a few days before it is completed) . My thought process is that I would continue to work on accepting/rejecting face suggestions as the program continues to import/scan so the job wouldn’t be as large at the end.

Thanks for your support!

Andrey

jclay I see several questions here, so let me try to address them one by one.

It should not be a problem confirming suggestions when indexin is still in the process.
Program does learn from rejected faces too
It is totallty normal if suggestions quality degrades with time. That means program already suggested you faces that are most similar to ones, and now it has to offer is less similar faces
It might happen that for some person it will be suggesting a lot of “garbage” suggestions, while not suggesting anything reasonable. The reason for that is usually low quality images in already confirmed faces (such as small resolution, not looking into the camera, partly obscured, low light and so on). In that case you might use “suggest less” option. It can be switched back again any time later.

Obvously accepting suggetsions is much more efficient process that manually going thru each photo. However, it has its own limitations. At some point it might run into the situation that it will stop suggesting faces, while mecessary faces might still be threre. So if your goal is to get 100% accuracy, at some point you will actually need to go check photo by photo. However, my recommendation is to delay that till the very end. Let first automated process make the most for you, and when it is done, you can go and check what it had missed. Since your scanning is not even finished, it is definitely too early for that.

Here’s few tips that can help you use automated process more efficient:

Start marking up a new person from hight quality photos only, looking into the camera. That will save you lot of time in the beginning.
When you have some person’s faces constantly showing up as suggestions, instead of just rejecting, mark them as this person (but again, start from goog quality images first). This help reducing amount of false suggestions.