Click and share: A face recognition tool for the mobile community

In this paper, we describe an Android based application for mobile devices that allows users to quickly and easily identify faces in pictures, recognizing persons, and, thus, sharing pictures with them. Each identified person matches against a contact registered in the phone directory, and, if no match is found, the detected face can be used for the creation of a new contact. We discuss how face recognition in a mobile setting increases the efficiency of the users while sharing content created with the mobile device, automatically suggesting the people identified in a photo or a video. We show the effectiveness of the approach through a user test on a photo sharing task, showing that it reduces the need for tedious, in particular on mobile devices, user input (e.g., compared to Facebook). By this means, we envision an increase of the quality of the user experience when interacting with the components of her social network.