Is 8.6.0 face recognition supposed to handle animals?

[Michael Miller]

Hello everyone,
I am wondering whether we could make it trainable on other categories, and whether they could be used to identify other specific categories of objects (flowers, cacti, insect families, etc.)
Strictly speaking, no we can’t update the face models to look for other faces or objects.

However, I’ve been exploring adding additional models that are specialized for various tasks like identifying flowers and animals, and one specifically for birds (my mother-in-law loves to take bird pictures). There are many, many models available, and with the new pipelines and classifiers in digiKam 8.6.0, it’s quite easy to add them.

The idea is that we would make the specialized models optional downloads and then make them available in the auto tagging feature.  We can explore this feature if enough people think it’s useful.

Cheers,
Mike

On Mar 28, 2025, at 6:04 AM, corrado.topi at hausoos.com wrote:

Dear all,

I am wondering whether we could make it trainable on other categories, and whether they could be used to identify other specific categories of objects (flowers, cacti, insect families, etc.)

Kind regards

Quoting Frédéric Da Vitoria <davito9w at free.fr<mailto:davito9w at free.fr>>:

Hello Michael,

I decreased the slider to 5 and ran the scanner. It found half a dozen more dogs, no cats, and a few birds. And quite a number of completely irrelevant areas, just as you predicted. All in all, I consider that it is still worth it because it also recovered (and sometimes identified) hundreds of faces, so I'll leave this setting at this level.

BTW, I am amazed by how it manages to find faces in areas where only an ear or an eye are visible. This makes me think that it identifies animals not because they look like humans (the dogs which were identified did not look like humans, and of course neither did the birds) but that a few animal samples were incuded in the training. I guess no cats were included, which would explain why it did not find any, although cat faces are closer to human faces than dogs or birds.

Afterword: I tried to check on a subset of my pictures if decreasing detection accuracy would find cats. In the "Search in" tab, I checked some of the cat tags, set the accuracy to 4 and hit "Scan collection for faces". dK answered "Items scanned for faces: 0" and "Face found: 0". I don't understand "Items scanned for faces: 0" as the 5 tags I selected amount to more than 100 photos.

Regards,

--
Frédéric Da Vitoria


On 26/03/2025 19:21, Michael Miller wrote:
Hello everyone,
Face detection is optimized for human faces. It will occasionally detect animal faces. You can try setting the detection accuracy slider to 4 or 5 to see if it will detect more animal faces, but this will also increase the number of false positives.

Cheers,
Mike



Sent from my T-Mobile 5G Device



-------- Original message --------
From: Frédéric Da Vitoria <davito9w at free.fr>
Date: 3/26/25 10:23 AM (GMT-08:00)
To: digikam-users at kde.org
Subject: Re: Is 8.6.0 face recognition supposed to handle animals?

Thank you for your answer.

I just checked, it detected only 2 dog faces, and it missed hundreds of others, including more than 300 pictures of the 2 dogs it just detected. So maybe face recognition works, but face detection isn't very efficient? Anyhow, I'm going to tell him those dog's names and hope it will find other occurrences.

Regards,

On 26/03/2025 18:01, Gilles Caulier wrote:
Hi,

Here my dog's face is also detected and recognized if tagged previously. So, I think the model has been taught with domestic animals, at least. I don't test with cats anyways (no cat at home (:-)))...

Best

Gilles Caulier

Le mer. 26 mars 2025 à 17:33, Frédéric Da Vitoria <davito9w at free.fr<mailto:davito9w at free.fr>> a écrit :

  Hello,

  I updated to 8.6.0. In the unknown faces folder, I found 2 dogs.
  Should
  I tell dK to ignore them or is there any chance the new face
  recognition
  engine will recognise those dogs in the future?




--

Kind Regards. Corrado
--
Dr. Corrado Topi PhD (current working time zone: CET)

--
DOTT. CORRADO TOPI
Strategic research for sustainable resilient development
VAT REG: IT15891141002
Via Barasso 34
00126 Roma, Italia
Email PEC: corrado.topi at pec.net<mailto:corrado.topi at pec.net>
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Stockholm Environment Institute Affiliate, Asia Center (Bangkok, Thailand)
Visiting Research Fellow, The York Management School, University of York

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