CS229 Project Report: Automated photo tagging in Facebook

We examine the problem of automatically identifying and tagging users in photos on a social networking environment known as Facebook. The presented automatic facial tagging system is split into three subsystems: obtaining image data from Facebook, detecting faces in the images and recognizing the faces to match faces to individuals. Firstly, image data is extracted from Facebook by interfacing with the Facebook API. Secondly, the Viola-Jones’ algorithm is used for locating and detecting faces in the obtained images. Furthermore an attempt to filter false positives within the face set is made using LLE and Isomap. Finally, facial recognition (using Fisherfaces and SVM) is performed on the resulting face set. This allows us to match faces to people, and therefore tag users on images in Facebook. The proposed system accomplishes a recognition accuracy of close to 40%, hence rendering such systems feasible for real world usage.