Nontrivial Exercises

Facial Recognition in Videos? Google’s Possible Plans for YouTube

Google announced today that the recent rumors were true and that they acquired the most popular video hosting and sharing site YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock.

The deal makes sense from the aspect of the information Giant absorbing more raw sources of information, namely user-generated video. Google is all about getting their hands on information and making it available and accessible to anyone. Of course one of their ultimate goals is to sell advertising by organizing ads by very specific content. With over 100 million video views a day, YouTube has a huge chunk of content that people want to access.

On the other hand, having the giant financial foundation of Google underneath the site that hosts thousands of copyright violations of music and video now would seem to give more motivation to the copyright holders to seek to recover some money. Look for several lawsuits against Google to appear now that there is actually some money behind the service - and therefore money for copyright violation lawsuits or settlements.

I wonder, however, if part of Google’s technology strategy is to find a way to index and search videos in a whole new way. Google acquired Neven Vision without too much fanfare in August. Neven Vision develops face recognition technology and Google presumably has plans to integrate face / person recognition into Picasa, their photo management and editing application.

Compare the Google-Neven Vision combination with Riya, the more-well-known facial recognition photo service that started last year. Since launching their service that was essentially a Flickr with face / person recognition, Riya has now enlarged their vision to become a visual search engine for the web.

Riya is thinking bigger than just making personal photo organization easier and more fun - they recognize a huge hole in the search market and believe they have the technology to implement it. They make a compelling case for what visual search could do.

Now back to Google and YouTube. Could it be that Google has also recognized the potential of a true visual search for information - or pictures - or videos. Could Google have plans to enhance the Neven Vision image recognition technology to apply it to video?

With Google now “owning”, or at least controlling, the vast majority of user-generated video content and the brand that is the de facto standard in video sharing, Google could index and apply special tags or image meta-data that would be specifically tailored to the Neven Vision recognition technology and enable a proprietary search paradigm for all YouTube videos.

Security and privacy concerns aside, an effective visual search would be at worst interesting and fun to play with, and at best a lucrative new way to sell targeted advertising. It would also answer Riya’s bold challenge to Google in the search game.

it will be fun to see what happens.