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We had this exact same thing happen when we bought funeral services for my (late) older brother. They asked us for a bunch of pictures of him and some of his f
by xnull 12y ago
We had this exact same thing happen when we bought funeral services for my (late) older brother. They asked us for a bunch of pictures of him and some of his favorite music to use in a slideshow they were preparing as part of the funeral package.
We have everyone at the service, in the pews and settled in. The lights dim, a projector screen rolls down and music starts to play. His music. Their slideshow was not exactly a slideshow, but an automatically generated remembrance DVD. It started with a flyover of some nature/rambling rivers and then rose into the air into parting clouds.
So far so good.
The DVD was an interspersing of stock nature footage and pictures of my brother. Face recognition algorithms were used to find where he was in each picture and slowly 'zoom' into them, or pan over to center on him. I think basically so that there was some sort of movement to the pictures.
But their software (or more likely the software they had licensed) hadn't gotten his face right. Instead it kept zooming in on family members and (tragically) cutting him out. Instead it zoomed in constantly on my sister. It was obvious that either the software didn't have a way to correct such errors, or that the funeral home hadn't bothered to preview the DVD before making it a part of the service.
- jewel 12y agoI work on slideshow creation software for funeral homes. Stories like yours are something I worry quite a bit about, since we've found that once users trust our software, they stop bothering with the preview. We let the user choose custom zoom points but don't yet incorporate face recognition. As far as I am aware, none of our competitors have face recognition or even face detection. Some funeral homes hire or outsource to a local videographer instead of using purpose-built software. It's possible that the videographer could have used a slideshow plugin with that feature and then combined it with the stock footage.