Yandex.Images: Look into Those Faces

Internet, December 17, 2008. Starting today, Yandex users can search specifically for portraits. Yandex’s image search service Yandex.Images has learnt to detect human faces in all sorts of images. It can identify individual and group portraits, photographs and pictures.

The “Portraits” filter in Yandex.Images radically changes search results for many queries. For instance, the [malevich] query on Yandex image search would retrieve mainly abstract paintings by this artist, but with the “Portarits” option on, Yandex.Images users will see what the artist looked like and who his models were. And the [formula 1] query will have in the search results not only images of race cars, but also pictures of their drivers.

"It’s not always enough to consider only image descriptions to provide quality search results for images,” says Fedor Romanenko, principal developer of Yandex.Images. “That is why we are implementing image analysis algorithms. Earlier, we have launched image search by dominant color, duplicate detection and photo filtering. Face detection technology is one of the latest achievements in “computer vision” and we are happy to demonstrate to our users what it can do”.

Contact:
Media Relations
Vladimir Isaev, Ochir Mandzhikov
Phone: +7 495 739-7000
E-mail: pr@yandex-team.com