Face recognition coming to Picasa - Google purchases Neven Vision

It looks as if face recognition is on its way to Picasa after Google announce on their blog that the Neven Vision team is now part of Google.

In announcing the move, Adrian Graham, Picasa Product Manager, notes that:

It's not always easy to search through your personal photos, and it's certainly a lot harder than searching the web. Unless you take the time to label and organize all your pictures (and I'll freely admit that I don't), chances are it can be pretty hard to find that photo you just know is hidden somewhere deep inside your computer.

We've been working to make Picasa (Google's free photo-organizing software) even better when it comes to searching for your own photos—to make finding them be as easy as finding stuff on the web. Luckily we've found some people who share this goal, and are excited that the Neven Vision team is now part of Google.

Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects. This technology just may make it a lot easier for you to organize and find the photos you care about. We don't have any specific features to show off today, but we're looking forward to having more to share with you soon.

Neven Vision had offices in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Munich and Kuala Lumpur. It's unclear whether the team will all be moving to the Picasa offices (also in LA).

The Neven Vision site is unavailable just now slick to look at, but the downloads/demos are listed as "coming soon"! The Japanese operation site N-Vision is still up and running.

The team which grew out of university research in Germany are very well regarded for their machine vision technology - it's not just facial analysis, but also more general object analysis. The company was founded by Dr Hartmut Neven in 2003, and capitalized at 140million Yen, which is about US $1.2 Million.

Update: Plenty of comment on this across the web:

• Google acquires Neven Vision by Munjal from Riya.com (which also uses facial recognition).
• Google May Soon Tell You Where Your Picture Was Taken
• Object Recognition Is The Future Of Google
• Google Buys Neven Vision
• Google acquires biometric company Neven Vision

Update:

William Slawski has done some good research into the many patents that Neven Vision hold.