Don't know that face? Amazon Rekognition can now pick out celebrities

By Lulu Chang June 10, 2017

amazon rekognition celebrities rek celeb jeff bezos 1 — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Not sure why that face looks so familiar? It may just be that it belongs to a famous person. And now, Amazon can help tell you who that famous person is, thanks to an update to Amazon Rekognition. The Seattle-based tech giant introduced its image recognition software, which incorporates deep-learning technology, last year, and has already been used to search, verify, and organize millions of images. And now, it can recognize celebrities.

Geared at developers, this deep-learning software promises to make it “easy to add image analysis to your applications.” Previously, Amazon made it possible to detect objects, scenes, faces, and even identify inappropriate content. It also allowed users to search and compare faces. And as per its latest update, it can “identify hundreds of thousands of people who are famous, noteworthy, or prominent in fields that includes politics, sports, entertainment, business, and media.”

The global list is said to be updated frequently, and developers can access the feature by calling the RecognizeCelebrities function. Amazon explains that aside from the bounding box and facial landmark feature already returned by the DetectFaces function. This new addition will give you relevant information about any famous person it recognizes. Currently, it will link to a celebrity’s IMDB page, if applicable, though Amazon notes, “We may add other sources in the future.”

With the new function, developers can also now index image archives by celebrity. Further, they have the option to use a combination of celebrity recognition and object detection to build a wide range of search tools.

As TechCrunch points out, Microsoft’s Cognitive Services also offers celebrity recognition, and claims to be able to identify around 200,000 famous folks. Cognitive Services also gives users additional information about an image containing a celebrity, like what he or she is wearing or doing.

You can take Amazon Rekognition for a test run yourself by going here.

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