Knowing who you are and who you know: Harnessing social networks to identify people via mobile devices

Abstract

With more and more images being uploaded to social networks each day, the resources for identifying a large portion of the world are available. However the tools to harness and utilize this information are not sufficient. This paper presents a system, called PhacePhinder, which can build a face database from a social network and have it accessible from mobile devices. Through combining existing technologies, this is made possible. It also makes use of a fusion probabilistic latent semantic analysis to determine strong connections between users as well as social photos. We demonstrate a working prototype that can identify a face from a picture taken from a mobile phone using a database derived from images gathered directly from a social network and return a meaningful social connection to the recognized face. © Springer-Verlag 2013.