This is a project to bring facial recognition to archival photo collections. The technology has grown by leaps and bounds to meet the parameters of social media and a few other applications, but I believe it can also reveal important historical data, too. There are deep layers of associative meaning in photo collections, which could be invaluable to researchers.

You can read a short process paper about the project here.

The software is built on the Openface project, which uses OpenCV2, Torch, and DLib (among other great open-source software) to detect and classify faces through deep neural networks.

Check out the GIT repository at https://github.com/CLByers/AFID

Thanks to the Washington State Archives Digital Archives for the photos in this dataset.

I'm Charlie Byers, an M.A. student in Eastern Washington University's public history program. Email me at CLByers at gmail dot com.