Patent ID: 8416997

Claim:
A method for automatically identifying persons in digital media assets associated with a database of individual user accounts, comprising: providing access to the database of individual user accounts, wherein the database includes connections between the individual user accounts; designating a collection of digital media assets, wherein each digital media asset is associated with one or more of the individual user accounts and wherein one or more of the digital media assets have been tagged with the identity of one or more previously identified persons; receiving a digital media asset associated with a first individual user account; analyzing the received digital media asset to detect an unidentified person contained in the received digital media asset; extracting appearance features for the unidentified person; using the database of individual user accounts to produce a list of candidate individuals corresponding to previously identified persons; determining weights for each candidate individual in the list of candidate individuals responsive to a connection path between the candidate individual and the first individual user account, wherein the weights can take on any of three or more possible values corresponding to three or more different connection paths; using a processor to perform an identification process to identify the detected unidentified person from the list of candidate individuals responsive to trained person identifiers for the candidate individuals, the extracted appearance features, and the determined weights; associating metadata with the received digital media asset providing an indication of the identity of the detected unidentified person.