Mugr -- face recognition and search startup enters private beta | Hacker News Reader

Mugr -- face recognition and search startup enters private beta

blog.mugr.com

9 pointsmc9 comments

We're a Phoenix startup doing face search and recognition. We just released Mugr on Monday and would love to hear any feedback you have.

Hey MC, the service sounds pretty cool! I'm in the process of learning as much as possible about recognition techniques.

According to the FAQ, you're not performing face detection (you ask users to crop their photos). Did you find that the process was too computationally expensive?

EDIT - after completing the registration process I was given an error page. But the process must've completed, since I can log in and use the site just fine.

I have some additional comments (for instance, when cropping my user photo it'd be nice to see an example of a "good crop" so I know how tightly to focus the box around my face, without having to click through to the guidelines page). Is there an email address I can contact you at?

Hey Ed. Thanks for signing up. For the initial registration process, we decided it was easier if we let our users crop their profile images. Later on this week we'll see a post with an example of our software doing face detection.

Thanks for the suggestions. For my email address, check out my news.ycomb profile.

Great! Just FYI, you have to put the email address in the "about" text area. I guess the email field is only used internally by YC.

While I've got you here, I'll just my initial reactions:

- 100KB photo limit is waaay too small. Restrict image dimensions, if anything.

- Error messages on the side of the page (on the mugshots upload page) are not very visble

- What kind of things would I put in the "tags" box? Are they comma or space delimited?

- "The person may be from the orient, but they aren't oriented toward the camera." - This joke is in poor taste...

- Connections page is empty?

- I don't really know what to do after I've registered...

- Problem with links (I see http://http:// -- you gotta standardize your inputs!)

- I uploaded a photo to search, and am returned all users in the network? This page is confusing!

- In order to limit the number of returned users I cropped just my face and uploaded the photo for search. It seems like I was returned everyone but myself!

Ed, thanks again for the feedback.

One of the reasons we're doing a limited beta is to give us time to find and work out stuff like this. Also, it takes a little while for your profile images to get indexed. Thanks for being patient with us.

So this is for web 2.0 collaborative mugging then? If I put up a pictures of myself plus relevant details of the valuables I'm likely to be carrying then potential muggers can check me out before hand and decide whether or not it's worth it.

Awesome

Wow, looks like Nicholas Carr picked up on the launch:

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/10/mugr_from_faceb.ph...

So if I send you a pic, you will search your whole database to detect who is on that photo?

How can I as a person keep you from putting me into your database?

We'll be supporting web, email and mobile-based searches to identify people via headshot, however, we don't crawl the web or search photo album sites for subjects. The only way we'll actually store (and thus be able to search for you) is if you have profile on Mugr.com.

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