Face Detection Stopped after a few folders

[GAJim]

I'm having a problem with ACDSee Face Detection.
The face suggestions has just seemed to stop at about 30-40 folders.
It ran for about 30 folders and then quit. I don’t see any more new faces in the unnamed or suggestions in the named lists.
I've tried re-running it with no improvement.
While in People mode, the folder list on the left only shows the few folders that ACDSee has scanned.
Thank you



ACDSee Photo Studio Home 2022
Version 25.0 Build 1871

My ACDSee db is :
11GB
Appears to have scanned 208,911 image and video files
4381 folders browsed
208,872 images with thumbnails


My Personal Photos folder that it should be scanning has
1.28TB
255,828 files
5159 folders

[Greyfox]

GAJim

I'm still coming to grips with Face Recognition in Ultimate 2022, having not used it in previous versions, however in my system , before I cleared it out to run some tests, it had scanned and assigned names to images in well over 500 folders, and I have to say the automatic recognition rate was impressive. Not 100% of course, but definitely impressive..

I've made the following observations.

If I go to Tools/Options/Face Detection, un-tick "Automatically detect faces in images", un-tick "Allow Face Detection to detect faces whilst your computer is idle using the ACDSee indexer", and un-tick "Enable Facial Recognition", then click on the Remove all Face Data, then at the end of the removal ACDSee will restart, and at that point face detection is not enabled, and all previous face detection data has been cleared out..

If I then tick "Automatically detect faces in images", tick "Allow Face Detection to detect faces whilst your computer is idle using the ACDSee indexer" and tick "Enable Facial Recognition", and then click on OK, then exit ACDSee and restart it, then ACDSee start a face detection scan, but for this first start after enabling the detection it appears to consistently only add unnamed faces for the "Home Folder".

On subsequent starts, sometimes it appeared to do nothing, other times it started a relatively lengthy face detection scan, and if left alone completed a scan of all of the parent folders (and their child folders) that were listed in Tools/Options/ACDSee Indexer. I found however that moving from manage mode to View or Edit Modes seems to pause this scan, and it then resumes when back in manage mode.. As there is no visual indication in ACDSee (that I'm aware of) of this scan being in progress one has to rely on the increased whine of the fans ( the CPU activity during a scan here uses between 40% to 90% CPU), or have Windows Task Master open, or have a task bar utility like XMeters that shows Memory, CPU and Network use permanently in the task bar..

Edit: Correction, there is in fact a count showing how many files remaining just above the task bar right hand end



I have yet to determine exactly why this subsequent full scan took place sometimes, but not always,and I can't remember it doing so when I was running the system with a large collection of named faces, so this may only apply on runs where the face detection has just been applied..

From the help file, ticking the box for "Rerun Face Detection" in Tools/Options/Face Detection only allows Face Detection to rerun if files have been changed since the last time Face Detection was run on them. With this enabled, Face Detection will rerun next time you browse the changed files either in Manage or View mode. So that appears to only re detect individual files that have changed and are subsequently browsed.

With regard to the "Rerun Recognition" button in the Face Detection dialog, the help file however says that "In order to correct names mistakenly assigned to faces by ACDSee, you can rerun facial recognition on faces you have not manually named. This clears all names assigned by ACDSee's facial recognition, but leaves manually entered names. ACDSee will then attempt to recognize unnamed faces based on names you have entered manually.

For me, yet some way to go to get a better understanding of how this function works.

One point perhaps worth noting. When checking anything that depends on the ACDSee Indexer, I set the idle time to 1 minute.

[GAJim]

Thanks GreyFox,
I've tried the following :
- unticked the boxes you suggested and hit 'OK'
"Automatically detect faces in images"
"Allow Face Detection to detect faces whilst your computer is idle using the ACDSee indexer"
"Enable Facial Recognition"
- went back into the options screen and checked them again - hit 'OK'

I did not click 'Remove all Face data' because I've got a lot of manually entered face data.

Thanks for the note about the number of files remaining for face scans. I've located that on bottom right of the Manage Panel.
Your observation about this only running while sitting in the Manage Mode seems to be correct.
I was letting the app sit in the People mode and minimizing the app hoping it was working
.




I'm now getting more images and suggestions in my UnNamed / Named people Mode.

Thanks for your help.

[Tristan H]

Hi,

I thought I should clarify a bit how and when face detection runs, and what it chooses to run on.

When the "Automatically detect faces in images" option is checked, whenever you browse to a folder in Manage mode, each image in the folder is checked against its database record to see if face detection was already run on it before. If not, it is added to a queue of images. The size of the queue is visible in that bottom right "Scanning for faces" text. You can also hover over the text to see the image that is currently having face detection run on it.

If "Rerun Face Detection" is also checked, instead of checking whether face detection ever ran on the image, it will check the image's modified time against the timestamp when face detection was last run. If the image has been modified since face detection was last run, it will be queued again. Images that have never had face detection run will be queued whether this setting is on or not.

"Automatically detect faces" also controls whether face detection will actually run on the queued images or not. So if you disable it, whatever was already queued for face detection will remain, but nothing new will be added to the queue, and face detection won't run on the queued images. You could turn the option back on later and it would start running on the queued images again.

Finally, "Automatically detect faces" will also allow face detection to run in View mode, but only on the currently-viewed image. Queued images are only ever run in Manage mode, not in View, People, or any other mode.

The Indexer face detection option does exactly the same thing as "Automatically detect faces", except it controls queuing and face detection while Indexer is running. Indexer and the main app share the same queue, so that is why you will sometimes see face detection run on folders that are in Indexer's scan list. The images were scanned and queued by Indexer, but the main app will also run on those queued images if they haven't been completed. Similarly, if you browse folders and queue images in ACDSee, Indexer can later run face detection on those images.

"Enable Facial Recognition" and the Rerun Recognition command don't have anything to do with face detection. If checked, "Enable Facial Recognition" will try to recognize and name faces whenever they are detected. Since you can manually run face detection from Tools > Face Detection > Redetect Faces, you could choose to disable automatic face detection but still run both detection and recognition on images of your choice. Alternatively, if you turned on automatic detection but disabled recognition, you could have ACDSee put all detected faces into the Unnamed view in People mode so that you could do the recognition yourself.

Rerun Recognition will remove any names or suggestions that ACDSee itself added from the entire database, leaving behind only those names that you yourself have added and suggestions you confirmed. Then it will rerun recognition on all unnamed faces. This was useful before the 2022 version in correcting facial recognition if it had named faces incorrectly, which could lead to it naming more faces incorrectly. Now that People mode lets you view peoples' faces more easily, it might not be so needed anymore.

There is also a command Tools > Face Detection > Rerun Recognition, which will rerun recognition only on selected images. This would let you, e.g. take a newly-scanned folder of new people and rerun recognition only on it, without affecting the rest of your database.

If you find that your face detection queue has gotten too long, you can use Tools > Face Detection > Clear Queue to clear the queue. Images will be queued again as they are browsed or scanned.

Most or all of this information is available in the help file. I'd suggest starting with the Manage mode and Options topics:

• https://help.acdsystems.com/en/acdse...ion_Manage.htm
• https://help.acdsystems.com/en/acdse...EDETECTION.htm

There are links to some other topics like View and People mode at the bottom of those topics.

Hopefully that makes the whole face detection & recognition component of ACDSee make more sense.

Thanks,
Tristan H.
ACD Systems

[Greyfox]

Tristan H

Thank you for that information, much appreciated.

[GAJim]

Tristan H and @Greyfox

It looks like in this instance

https://forum.acdsee.com/forum/main/general-discussion/58089-manage-mode-view-mode-corrections-vs-people-mode

It appears I should have run the command

1. Tools > Face Detection > Rerun Recognition

Instead of 2. Tools > Options > Face Detection > Rerun Face Detection

It appears since running #2 it is running all 255K files on all folders instead of the single folder I had selected in manage mode.
I probably should have just run option #1 ?

It would be nice if you could run this command from right clicking on a specific folder in manage mode ? ( I dont think that option is there, and cant check now because that rerun process will be running for a while

[Tristan H]

Hi GAJim,

Enabling the Rerun Face Detection option will only cause face detection to rerun on files whose timestamps update after face detection previously ran (because they were edited or changed in some way). In the case in your other thread, having batch rotated images, it is wise to let face detection run on them again completely. Changing an image's rotation by 90 degrees or more completely changes the appearance of the faces as the detection/recognition system sees them.

That being said, you were asking in the other thread about why you were still seeing previous suggestions. This is because face detection is only running on one image at a time, and the previous face data is still present in each image until face detection reaches it and reruns. If you are in the process of having face detection rerun on a lot of images anyway, it might be a good idea to select those images now and use Tools > Face Detection > Remove Faces to immediately delete all the face data from them. That way you will eliminate all the old pre-rotated face data immediately, so it will stop appearing in People mode and also not have any effect on recognition while face detection is rerunning.

Thanks,
Tristan H.
ACD Systems

[GAJim]

Thank you !
I'll experiment with that.
Jim

[Rau]

Tristan H

I thought I should clarify a bit how and when face detection runs, and what it chooses to run on.

Thanks for your detailed post above.

Can I ask you a few more FR-related questions? [I'm trialling the Pro product]

1) The catalog can be searched for "Auto-named Faces". Can you confirm what that term means (includes)? No doubt it includes those faces to which the system has assigned a name without referencing the user (for this specific instance). Does it include any other case, eg. where the system proposed a name and the user confirmed it (via the green tick)?

2) There will be people in images where their face is concealed, obscured or very poorly presented (due to image resolution/poor focus, angle or whatever). If I nevertheless mark out the face (head) with a rectangle and provide the person's name, is that going to "pollute" the face data the system is gathering for that person? [....and hence diminish the system's ability to match that person's face against other images?]

3) Related to (2), it is highly desirable to be able to associate a person (name) with an image, despite that person's face not being clearly evident in the image. I'd like to know what the best way is to do that. If what I've described in (2) does not harm the Face Recognition process, then that would seem to do. But if it will cause some harm (to FR accuracy), then there needs to be another way. Other systems I've used allow a Person to be associted with an Image, but without any reference to a rectangle on the image. That seems a good solution too, and (IMHO) much preferable to using Keywords when we already have the People metadata.

Many thanks

[Tristan H]

Hi Rau,

The Auto-Named Faces search will return only those faces which facial recognition named itself. Confirmed suggestions are considered exactly equivalent to manually naming a face, so they are not included in Auto-Named Faces. Pending suggestions are also not included.

Drawing a face box manually and naming it will not affect facial recognition in any way. You can feel free to draw and name face boxes for people that face detection missed without worrying about doing damage to the recognition system. So you can absolutely handle 3) as you suggested.

Thanks,
Tristan H.
ACD Systems