Turning a Threat to a Benefit: Controversial AI Delights DAM Users

QUINCY, Mass., Feb. 10, 2020 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- All new technologies can be put to good uses, or misapplied to bad uses. We are all familiar with the privacy and law enforcement issues around Facial Recognition, but what if your work involves getting the most out of your company's image archive?

Until now all searching for the photo you need in a DAM (Digital Asset Management) system has been done using text someone laboriously typed into every image's record, one photo at a time. What if you could click on a face in one image, type in the name once, and instantly find that person in all your other images, even if none of those images had ANY text to search against? What if your DAM could learn to "see" the actual content of each image?

"Incredibly more efficient…"

The New York Power Authority, the largest state public power authority in the United States, spent hours going through each image in their 300,000+ image library to identify and tag the people in them. That was before adding Facial Recognition to their Merlin X DAM:

"I'm loving this Facial Recognition feature in Merlin! To be able to search and tag people by face is invaluable!" says Maria Tarapacki, NYPA's Photo Information Specialist. "In an organization of 1,800+ employees, facial recognition has been a huge time and money saver for our agency. Not only is the tagging system incredibly easy to use, MerlinAI Facial Recognition saves us countless hours not having to go through every picture in the database and add people's name over and over again. It's amazing how it's made my day-to-day incredibly more efficient, not to mention how much money we're saving simply in resource time alone."

"Critical to our overall Business Objective"

The Humane Society of the United States is dedicated to the fight to stop animal cruelty and saves the lives of thousands of animals each year.

"Our users frequently upload images in bulk, and they don't always include the names of everyone pictured in the metadata, so we had tons of photos of people in our library without their names attached. We're asked for photos of individuals often, and before MerlinOne's Facial Recognition tool, it was up to us to remember what photos people might be in based on the recent events they attended or activities they participated in," states Michelle Riley, the organization's Director of Photography. "By having Facial Recognition installed in our Merlin X DAM, all we have to do is tag someone once, and then we're easily able to find photos of them going forward; the system even recognizes them when new photos come in, so we don't have to be constantly tagging people we've already tagged. Now, we're able to get our images out to the world faster so that our mission is successfully met. It's truly an excellent feature and is critical to our overall business objective to help animals."

"Photo archives incredibly more valuable."

Akron Children's Hospital is ranked among the best children's hospitals in the country, and is known for its compassionate approach to treatment. Jim Arnold, their Digital Media Manager, says:

"Merlin's Facial Recognition software is a transcending addition to our DAM. It's unearthed images of doctors, staff and administrators that were previously untagged and has made our photo archives incredibly more valuable." The tool gets increasingly useful over time, being able to instantly recognize and tag those individuals in future uploads, saving Akron's Merlin X users time with administrative tasks. "It's so exciting to know the system will only improve over time thanks to Merlin's underlying AI technology!"

"MerlinAI Facial Recognition is the result of 2 years of research and development, using the most recent and powerful approaches" says David Tenenbaum, CEO of MerlinOne, "and is just the first of a suite of AI powered enhancements to take DAM to a much higher level of usefulness while reducing human labor. Working magic for our users with the ethical application of AI is a huge focus for our company. Stay tuned!"

MerlinOne, Inc., a provider of digital asset management (DAM) software, is the industry's top vendor in offering unmatched AI tools, including Facial Recognition, to their Merlin X platform. Leveraging the power of first-rate research and domain expertise in visual biometrics and deep learning algorithms, MerlinAI Facial Recognition has become THE must-have easy to use tool allowing DAM users to immediately detect, tag and match millions of faces within their image library, with unmatched accuracy and functionality.

SOURCE MerlinOne