Photos app could improve in its face detection by estimating people's ages and using photo location along with photo date

Originator:dan
Number:rdar://31435029 Date Originated:4/4/2017
Status:Open Resolved:
Product:iLife Product Version:N/A
Classification:Enhancement Reproducible:N/A
 
Summary:
If Apple's Photos app were to incorporate some additional context into its face recognition software, it could be much more accurate. By estimating the age of a person's face, along with the date a photo was taken, it could avoid many false negatives by, for instance, not thinking a toddler in a recent photo is the same as a person who is now a teenager.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Use a photo library with children in it, including some (e.g. your own family) with photos ranging from a baby all the way up through childhood and young adulthood.
2. Identify the people in the photos, so that your children are identified all the way through their lifetime
3. Add some new, newly-taken photos with lots of various children in them, and then proceed to let Photos identify faces

Expected Results:
It would be very smart of Photos to NOT suggest that babies and young children are your own children, because based on the dates of the photos, it would be impossible for your children, now grown up, to be young children.

Actual Results:
This kind of logic, taking account a child's likely current age, is not being taken into account.  It would be great if it were!

Version:
N/A

Notes:
This would obviously be an additional feature, but it seems that if age recognition (c.f. <https://www.kairos.com/blog/determining-how-old-you-are-from-photos-and-video>) were employed, Photos could estimate approximately how old each person in its database is, based on the facial corpus and range of dates for each photo with that face in it.  That estimated age — thus, estimated birth year — could be used to help determine if an unidentified candidate face is likely or unlikely to be the a candidate identity, based on whether the age that a face appears to be is in line with the person's estimated age.

This kind of logic could  ALSO be applied with geo data in the photos.  If for instance, certain people generally only appear to be in photos taken in a particular location, maybe they are less likely to be found in a different location as well.

Configuration:
N/A

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