Harnessing Social Networks for Social Awareness via Mobile Face Recognition

Abstract

With more and more images being uploaded to social networks each day, the resources for identifying a large portion of the world are available. However the tools to harness and utilize this information are not sufficient. This thesis presents a system, called PhacePhinder, which can build a face database from a social network and have it accessible from mobile devices. Through combining existing technologies, this is made possible. It also makes use of a fusion probabilistic latent semantic analysis to determine strong connections between users and content. Using this information we can determine the most meaningful social connection to a recognized person, allowing us to inform the user of how they know the person being recognized. We conduct a series of offline and user tests to verify our results and compare them to existing algorithms. We show, that through combining a user’s friendship information as well as picture occurrence information, we can make stronger recommendations than based on friendship alone. We demonstrate a working prototype that can identify a face from a picture taken from a mobile phone, using a database derived from images gathered directly from a social network, and return a meaningful social connection to the recognized face.