MyHeritage.com: Facial Recognition & Geneology

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Israeli startup, MyHeritage.com, has a really interesting facial recognition technology that is part of their Geneology, Family History, and Family Tree suite of products. Today, I decided to try it out to see how well it worked.

First, I uploaded a picture of a toilet. The MyHeritage software immediately recognized that it wasn’t a human face and it told me so; I then uploaded a picture of a Garbage Pail Kid — Barfin’ Marvin — it didn’t recognize it as a human face either. Lastly, I tried a basketball to see if the MyHeritage software would recognize the basketball as a bald man, but, no, it didn’t recognize it as a human face. Lastly, I tried a creepy picture of a doll. Below is the result:

Yes, it’s a very, very creepy — almost freaky — looking doll. The collage around the doll are the celebreties the MyHeritage facial recognition software thinks the picture looks like. Digital Object Detection algorithms, I suspect, are very, very difficult. So, the results above with a picture of a doll are, pretty good in my opinion.

MyHeritage explains, at a high level, their approach to facial recognition:

MyHeritage also offers 3 other products in addition to its Facial Recognition product: Family Pages, Family Tree Builder, MyHeritage Research, MyHeritage Face Recognition.

I played with their MyHeritage Research product and noticed that the searche results showed where in the web my surname(s) appeared. This leads me to think that MyHeritage doesn’t appear to have a content acquisition strategy: their search is purely based on spidering the web for the geneological data the user is interested in. This is a weak approach — there is data in the deep web that is not captured. But, since there’s no content acquisition strategy — that we know of anyway — their cost structure is much lower because they rely on spidering the unstructured data of the web. Essentially, what MyHeritage has done is created a search algorithm that culls the web for surname queries the the user inputs into the search box. It doesn’t appear to render search results from content acquired via content acquisition. If what I say is true, then the MyHeritage Research product is almost no better than searching for your surname via any search engine — Google or Yahoo.

I didn’t experiment with the Family pages product of the Family Tree Builder product. But, the Facial Recognition product is very, very cool.

All in all, MyHeritage has a weak feature set and isn’t geared toward the hard-core geneologist — even the hobbyist might get bored with the surface data the web provides. But, the cool and most appealing product they have is the facial recognition product — clearly, it rivals Riya, not in breadth, but in functionality.

	This post was written by Pete Abilla