For many events, it is common to take a group photograph of the participants. This photograph, along with others, may be distributed as a “memory book” to the participants. A desirable feature of these memory books is to label one or more of the photographs with the names of the participants. These names may be included as inserts into the photograph or the names may be included as a caption. Furthermore, the memory book might contain more than the group photograph; therefore, it would be desirable to identify the subjects in each photograph.
FIG. 1 shows, in graphic form, a typical group photograph with labels identifying each subject in the photograph.
In FIG. 1, the group photograph 102 has been modified to add a caption, 104, identifying the event at which the photograph was taken, and in addition each individual in the photograph is identified by a text box containing the person's name near each person. An example of such label is 106.
Identifying and labeling each subject in a group photograph is a time consuming and error-prone process. Furthermore the identification can only be carried out by someone who is familiar with all of the potential subjects in the photographs.
Furthermore when many photographs are taken at an event, it is desirable to select a subset of the photographs that have some common feature. Commonly, this common feature is to include a set of photographs of an individual or individuals from the complete set of photographs from the event. To do this selection manually is very time consuming and hence expensive. Automating the process of identifying subjects in a photograph would create the opportunity to offer a variety of customized photographic records.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds