Seeking software for automated facial recognition from photos? A cousin of mine was doing some Thorp research, and found several unidentified photos that were in an album with some AJ Thorp photos and was wondering if there is a good facial recognition software that may be helpful in identifying the men in the photos? In other words, could we teach such software with identified photos of men of various ages that are identified, and use that to get suggestions for the unidentified photos? If not, what might be some other tools we might use?

Facial recognition software is improving all the time so, yes, we could teach it to help your search.

If you want a package that will tick away and compare pictures, looking for matches with a set of photographs, there are several on the market. None of them cheap. You can find them with your favourite search engine.

If you want something to try a quick check on a few pictures, there are a couple of services on the web:

Pictriev and the Microsoft site Twins or Not will both accept two photographs and then score a probability that the photographs are of the same person. These may help in what you seek but are not a perfect answer. Both sites are improving as more use is made of them - giving them the opportunity to learn.

In the future another possibility may arrive: Image recognition is one of the so-called superfunctions of the Wolfram language. It does not yet do facial recognition in the way you seek but it may do as the language grows.