Amazon Rekognition Update – Celebrity Recognition

We launched Amazon Rekognition at re:Invent (Amazon Rekognition – Image Detection and Recognition Powered by Deep Learning) and added Image Moderation earlier this year.

Today we are adding celebrity recognition!

Rekognition has been trained to identify hundreds of thousands of people who are famous, noteworthy, or prominent in fields that includes politics, sports, entertainment, business, and media. The list is global, and is updated frequently.

To access this feature, simply call the new RecognizeCelebrities function. In addition to the bounding box and facial landmark feature returned by the existing DetectFaces function, the new function returns information about any celebrities that it recognizes:

"Id": "3Ir0du6", 
"MatchConfidence": 97, 
"Name": "Jeff Bezos", 
"Urls": [ "www.imdb.com/name/nm1757263" ]

The Urls provide additional information about the celebrity. The API currently return links to IMDB content; we may add other sources in the future.

You can use the Celebrity Recognition Demo in the AWS Management Console to experiment with this feature:

If you have an image archive you can now index it by celebrity. You could also use a combination of celebrity recognition and object detection to build all kinds of search tools. If your images are already stored in S3, you can process them in-place.

I’m sure that you will come up with all sorts of interesting uses for this new feature. Leave me a comment and let me know what you build!

— Jeff;