Built-in face recognition for smart photo sharing in mobile devices

This paper presents a smart photo sharing application for mo bile devices based on an efficient yet powerful face recognition engine. The system allows registering subjects either from live video (mobile camera) or from still images, linking the obtained biometric information to the already existing phone contacts. The photo sharing application allows the user to select images which will be automatically processed with the built-in face recognition module based on Local Binary Patterns: already registered contacts will be identified, so that the current picture can be sent to them in a smart, user-friendly manner. The application also allows to tag unknown subjects and store (or update) their biometric profiles. All the processing is done in the mobile device. The current application runs on Android O.S., having been tested in two mobile platforms: HTC Desire and Samsung Galaxy Tab. The computational burden for each of the processing modules is provided in both devices, demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed approach for mobile platforms.