Apple has acquired yet another company that might prove fruitful for image and facial analysis in the future.
The company has acquired Regaind, a small French artificial intelligence startup focused on photo and facial analysis.
As usual, Apple offered the following comment regarding the transaction:
Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.
Per its website, Regaind has developed a computer vision API that can extract “game-changing insights” from images.
The company has offered the following description of its tools:
We help businesses and developers deal with massive flows of images by using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence to analyze and sort them. Your problem is often not reduced to finding a photo of a “sailboat” or of a “lion”: it’s also about finding the right one for your specific use, among many others. Regaind enables you to understand the content of an image, as well as to assess its technical and aesthetical values, so as to maximize your impact with high quality photos.
Regaind’s API can apparently analyze the aesthetics, sharpness, exposure, colors, and other properties of photos, and use that information to boost or promote the most relevant ones in a meaningful way.
The API can apparently also detect faces within a photo as well as the gender, age, and emotion of the people that appear. It’s possible that Apple is already using this technology for facial recognition features like Animoji in the iPhone X, and there could be additional implementations to follow.
The technology could be used to improve the Memories feature in the Photos app on iOS, for example, which already intelligently curates photos and videos based on activities, trips, holidays, people, pets, and more.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.
Via MacRumors and TechCrunch