Google buys Pittpatt; Tagging feature on its way to Google+

California, Jul 26: Well, it seems like soon you can tag your friends photo in your Google Plus albums! With the internet mammoth Google's acquisition of a seven-year-old company called Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition - or PittPatt - which develops facial-recognition technology for images and video, rumours started doing rounds that

will have facial recognition technology during its public launch.

Google announced the acquisition of PittPatt, but refused to disclose the financial matters of the deal. Pittpatt said that computer vision technology is already with Google through its many existing products such as Image Search, YouTube, Picasa, and Goggles, and it's a natural fit to join Google and bring the benefits of their research and technology to a wider audience.

"Joining Google is the next thrilling step in a journey that began with research at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in the 1990s and continued with the launching of Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (PittPatt) in 2004. We've worked hard to advance the research and technology in many important ways and have seen our technology come to life in some very interesting products," Pittpatt said in its website.

It's Google's second acquisition on facial-recognition technology as it purchased facial-recognition startup called Neven Vision in 2008. With the new acquisition, analysts opinionated that the search giant may be planning to add the facial recognition technology to its recently announced social networking site Google+.

Moreover, the market dominator Facebook introduced facial recognition technology earlier this year, but it faced serious criticism over security concerns. Facebook retorted back saying that users can disable the feature in their Privacy Settings.

Google has not yet announced the launch date of Google Plus, which has more than 20 million users, but said that they are working to add more features before its grand public release. So, stay tuned for more updates.

OneIndia News