Steve Kaplan

Wired ran an article today about Kodak's recent anouncement to "Scan the World." The project is described as:

"New hardware and software still in development digitizes old snapshots and extracts information from photos in order to automatically organize them." "Along with digitizing the images, the scanning software also assigns each image a tag based on the decade in which the photo likely was taken."

Kodak claims that their software will not only be able to do facial and text recognition within the photos, but also be able to judge the approximate date the photo was taken.

I don't buy much of anything Kodak is saying. The clues they use to deduce different information from photos are just not solid enough. They claim that they will use the paper size and whether the photo is B/W or color to figure out how old the picture is. Sounds like vaporware to me.

Come on. How many times in the last 100 years do you think Kodak has changed paper size? I'm no expert on photography but I bet its not too many. Also, there are plenty of photos taken today that are in black and white. Does this mean that the system will tell me they're from the 20's?

As for facial/text recognition, I can't imagine that what they have is much better than Riya. Riya, while the best out there right now, isn't even close to solving this problem. As they've said, its about "as smart as a 2 year old." Even if Kodak's technology is better, its hard to imagine that it is much better.

There's also the issue to deal with of aging. Last time I checked people's faces/hair/body change over time. This is a tough issue to deal with that I doubt a computer can reason out on its own yet.

Kodak has been having problems for a while now. Digital has been killing them and they are constantly looking for a way to go after the huge amount of photos that people now take because of digital. While "Scan the World" is a nice idea, it is most likely far, far from being something they can make real money on. Kodak has to figure out their story.

last updated 2 years ago comment