Q: Should I let Apple's face recognition learn ears?
I would have thought this a silly question until I began taking remedial steps that I won't be able to undo. Now, I just want to make sure the ear thing is actually a problem I should fix and not a useful thing I should appreciate.
For as long as I've been on Photos (~April 2015), it has detected ears and suggested them to me as faces. I once read that you can include the back of someone's head in their face album. The article implied that users (perhaps just lay ones) shouldn't worry about the person's obscured face or back-of-head screwing with the recognition algorithm. That's one piece of information.
The second is that perhaps Apple learns ears in order to identify profile photos. Maybe it learns a person's appearance according to its facial (frontal) features AND its ear (profile) features. In that case, I very well should be putting all images where my ear is exclusively circled into my face album.
Or maybe this is Apple's intention (although I cannot find anything to support this), but the software needs much development (like with African American faces). In that case, I wouldn't want to tell it to ignore the ears I see it's found; I'd just leave them be until the software is good enough to start profitably associating them with names.
I have been on the El Capitan Beta since my being invited between July and September.
The remedial steps I mentioned include making an album of ears and then, after catching many over the course of some time, selecting them all and choosing "Not a Face"
MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Mid 2014), Other OS, 10.11.4
Posted on Feb 15, 2016 3:55 AM



