SEE: The Privacy Paradox: How can businesses use personal data while also protecting user privacy? AWS has updated its models to provide more accurate detections and greater coverage of global celebrities. It also added three new metadata attributes to celebrity profiles – gender, expression, and smile – to help users search for specific moods of celebrities in stills and video. So, instead of a human spending hours tagging photos, AWS will tag them automatically across large media asset repositories. Similar facial recognition services include Microsoft’s Azure Face and Google’s Cloud Vision API, though it currently only offers a restricted and beta version of its facial celebrity recognition technology. Google’s service is also aimed at entertainment and media companies. The celebrity recognition feature promises to save media firms the cost of humans tagging media, while also making it easier to search images. “With the rapid proliferation in the volume of image and video content available on video on demand (VOD), streaming, and social media platforms, media companies are struggling to organize, search, and fully use their catalogs at scale,” AWS says in a blog post. “Similarly, news channels often need to rapidly locate images and videos of a particular celebrity in response to current events, but insufficient metadata makes it tedious to search their libraries for the right clips. Sports broadcasters also find it hard to quickly find the right footage from games and interviews to create highlights, shorts, and special programming.” Supported AWS regions for the celebrity recognition feature include the US, Asia Pacific, Japan, and Europe.
