Testing Ancestry's Photo Facial Recognition

One of the newer Ancestry.com updates is AI assisted facial recognition. I saw it mentioned in an email and quickly clicked on the button to test it out! I was directed to my media gallery, but was presented with no information on actually using the feature. A quick hop over to the help pages didn't yield any clues, so I started playing around.

From my media gallery, I selected a photo where I knew who was shown. In this picture is my mother as a young girl. To start facial recognition, first click on the "tag" button (shown with a red arrow in the photo).

Then click on the face of the person you want to search. A box will appear around the face and a pop up will appear where you can select someone in your tree, or choose "Recognize Ancestors". I chose "Recognize Ancestors". CAUTION: If you select someone in your tree, it will simply tag the selected person in the photo with the name chosen. It will NOT compare the photo to other photos of the person you may already have in your media gallery.

You'll be presented with possible matches for the person you selected, and an analysis of how viable the match suggestion may be. AI is searching other media in the database to look for potential matches. In this example, the top option is labelled "Great" for this match (but it does show it's a match to my own tree), none the less, it did match to the correct person, my mother, who was already in my tree. It matched her face to exactly the same photo, so it was easy to confirm AI did a good job analyzing this photo. 

While the first photo worked quite well, when I tried it on another photo of my mother, you can see from the results below, it did not do so well at all. I was presented with two potential matches, but none of the options were listed as "Great", only "Good" and "Fair". And none of the suggestions were actually the person in the photo. 

I tried the same test with 2 photos on another person in my tree, and I had the same results. It was 50/50 on how well the AI did. To use this feature, the media item must already be saved in your gallery. I tried this on a regular photo hint, but could not select to tag the person. It makes sense to only allow you to tag media you've already saved. But, on the flip side, it would be nice to be able to do facial recognition without actually tagging anyone at all, in advance of saving a photo hint. We all know, some photos are not of the person the original poster attributed them to, and it could potentially prevent (or at least limit) people from perpetuating incorrect information if they could verify before saving. To some extent, if you already have media saved, there's a reasonable chance you already know who's in the photo. But certainly, there are times when there are unknown people, or you take the details of a photo at face value, and would just like a way to see if the info may be correct.

The takeaway? While this is a great new tool to potentially help identify unknown people in a photo (or perhaps confirm your suspicions), it should be used with caution. Ideally, you'll be searching for people who you already have a photo of in your tree, where you'll be able to do your own comparison to see if you think the AI is correct. As with anything AI, it's best to double check everything. This is a big step in a new direction, but it's not a magic bullet.

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay
Photos of Margaret Irene LeRoy are from my media gallery