Apple iPhoto Face Detection

I typically use Apple iPhoto for the sole purpose of storing my favorite photos and albums so that they can be synchronized to my mobile devices (e.g., iPhone, iPad).  I think the face detection feature (Faces) generally works well, and there are some common and understandable situations in which it may incorrectly identify a person, for example:

• The person is not directly facing the camera (i.e., closer to a side profile)
• The facial expression is unusual (e.g., laughing hysterically, running, squinting)
• The person is wearing a hat

Today I was importing another album into iPhoto, and another obvious reason dawned upon me--the person's face is changing!  When I starting verifying the face detection, I noticed that it kept mistakenly guessing that my daughter was her older cousin, and I had to repeatedly correct the default face detection.  I assume that Faces learns facial patterns over time and that the more data you feed it, the better it performs.  However, my observations above would suggest that Faces is not tailored toward infants and small children who are growing quickly and whose facial dimensions that are included in the face detection algorithms are changing over time.

Since I am almost certain that the folks at Apple Inc. are checking my blog on a daily basis to do market research and to understand my personal needs, I will provide a suggestion for a product enhancement: build age progression algorithms into Faces.  The folks at Merrill Edge have done it in their online retirement planning application (http://faceretirement.merrilledge.com) so I bet the Apple version would produce similar if not superior results, and its user interface would be simple and elegant.  That is, iPhoto would simply allow a user to enter a birthday or age for each facial profile, and from there it would estimate the progression of facial features over time, checking against the EXIF data in each photo to calculate the age of each candidate face at the time the photo was taken, thereby improving face detection for everyone but most notably for small children.  No more overrides of default face detection for Digital Daddy--yeah!

I don't know if this can actually be reliably done, and I'm not sure how much value this would add to applications that use face detection, but it's interesting to think about.  Either way, it is amazing to see that my little girl is growing up, and I am glad that I have captured tens of thousands of photos of her, with countless more to come.  And now, it's time for me to get back to tagging faces.