Ultimate 2022 How to Prevent Face Detection from being redone

[Greyfox]

First I would again like to thank Tristan H for his detailed post on face detection settings https://forum.acdsee.com/forum/main/...8010#post58010

I have however the following situation:

In addition to my normal photo collection, and as a result of a long standing interest in genealogy, I have a significant collection of scanned images, including group images that contain a large number of faces, for example old school class photos. Typically these are scans of old black and white prints that have the class teacher and all the students in that class for a specific year. They can contain anywhere from 30 to 40 individual faces, but only one or maybe two faces belong to the family who's ancestry is being researched, and the rest are unknown.

With relatively high quality scans ACDSee sees a large number of these faces as "suitable for identification", but is mostly not be able to positively identify them, though it might provide suggestions for some. Mostly the faces are "boxed" but with the name bar blank. Where needed I have manually added the name to the one of two that are of interest, and have deleted both the suggestions and the non identified face "boxes" from the rest. No problem at this stage.

Subsequently however, after a period of several weeks, I found that ACDSee has revisited the images. I may have looked at the images in View mode in the meantime, but have not edited them, nor have I done a global Rerun Recognition or rerun recognition on the folders they are in. The faces I manually identified were still correctly identified, but there was once again a significant number of faces that had been "re-boxed", some with suggested names, some with just blank name bars. And so I had to repeat removing them once again.

At the moment, since the bulk of my images have now had the face identification completed and checked and embedded, I've disabled "Automatically detecting faces in images", which in turn disabled "Allow Face Detection ot detect faces while you computer is idle using the ACDSee Indexer". Previously I had both of these enabled. I've left "Enable Face Recognition" turned on. And the ACDSee Indexer is still enabled.

As new images are added, I am able to run Tools/Face Detection/ Redetect Faces to add detected faces to those images.

I'm hoping that prevents the face "boxes" removed in previously processed images being re-detected, but I'd like to know whether this is the correct way to do it.

[Regor250]

Interesting, I always thought re-detection was a manually initiated process too, don't know why it seems otherwise. I have not noticed the same happening on my system, I may have to give it a closer look before drawing any conclusion. I'll try reviewing images with previously removed face detections and see what happens.

[Regor250]

So far I have not been able to replicate the issue.

[Tristan H]

Hi Greyfox,

Because faces you deleted returned to the images, face detection must have been the process that ran again. If only recognition had run again, this would not find new faces you had previously deleted.

You mentioned that you had "Rerun Face Detection" enabled, but had not edited the images. That option could also cause face detection to rerun if something other than Develop/Edit mode changes were made (anything that alters the Windows Modified timestamp for the image would cause it), but this still seems unlikely.

Aside from that option, face detection will always rerun on an image if it had Develop/Edit mode changes saved, then it is restored to developed/original. This also seems unlikely based on what you have said.

Is it possible that you had embedded face data in the images before deleting the faces, then somehow imported the embedded face data back into the images? This could have been done with Tools > Face Detection > Import ACDSee Face Data, or by enabling the equivalent setting while using Tools > Database > Catalog Files. In this case the embedded data would override your database and restore the deleted faces. It doesn't seem likely, but it is the only scenario I can think of.

Thanks,
Tristan H.
ACD Systems

[Greyfox]

Tristan H


Thanks for your reply.

I think it is likely that it was due, as you have suggested, to a change in the modify date after the face recognition, and that in turn being down to subsequently changing the ACDSee Caption and re embedding it during the testing. Without going into a long story, I was using the ACDSee Caption as a test stage identifier.

I have now completed adding face metadata where applicable to all my collection and embedding it in the images. As I mentioned in my original post I'm currently now running with "Automatically detecting faces in images" disabled, which in turn disables "Allow Face Detection ot detect faces while you computer is idle using the ACDSee Indexer". "Enable Face Recognition" is still turned on and the ACDSee Indexer is still enabled.

Whilst that means that I have to manually do a face detection on each batch of new images I add to the database, and will also have to re-run it if I edit any previously detected images, I think I can live with that. If not I will turn on those functions again.