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Apple Acquires Regaind, a French Computer Vision Startup Focused on Photo and Facial Analysis

Friday September 29, 2017 9:52 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple has acquired Regaind, a small French artificial intelligence startup focused on photo and facial analysis, according to TechCrunch.

Apple essentially confirmed the deal with its standard statement:
Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.
Regaind has developed a computer vision API that can extract "game-changing insights" from images, according to its website.
We help businesses and developers deal with massive flows of images by using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence to analyze and sort them. Your problem is often not reduced to finding a photo of a "sailboat" or of a "lion": it's also about finding the right one for your specific use, among many others. Regaind enables you to understand the content of an image, as well as to assess its technical and aesthetical values, so as to maximize your impact with high quality photos.
Regaind is able to analyze the aesthetics, sharpness, exposure, colors, and other properties of photos, and use that information to boost or promote the most relevant ones in a meaningful way.

Regaind's computer vision API can also detect faces in a photo, as well as the gender, age, and emotion of the people that appear. It's possible that Apple is already using this technology for facial recognition features like Animoji in the iPhone X, and there could be additional implementations to follow.

Apple could use Regaind's technology to improve the Memories feature in the Photos app on iOS, for example, which already intelligently curates photos and videos based on activities, trips, holidays, people, pets, and more.

Tags: Apple acquisition, Regaind
[ 49 comments ]


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840quadra
18 months ago
With their focus being on internal machine learning, as opposed to cloud sourced solutions, it is nice to see them building their on portpholio with tools / technology to make those features better. Personally I am a big fan of local (private) machine learning, over cloud sourced AI. Privacy is only part of the reason for my opinion on this, I also like not having to use Data, and utilize the power of the devices we carry around.
Rating: 11 Votes
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The Barron
18 months ago
Excellent purchase, Apple. I love the photo & especially Face ID features and look forward to even better.
Rating: 8 Votes
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GuilleA
18 months ago

See? The French ARE good for something, guys! Excited to see where this goes.

Can't wait for the iPhone 9 and 10.1 Mountain Lion next year. /s


Bertrand Serlet is french.
Rating: 3 Votes
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SeattleMoose
18 months ago
Apple's obsession with "faces" is creepy. Potential for even more intrusion into our private lives. But young techies always put a "this is so great" spin while ignoring the potentials for MORE technology abuse, hacking, identity theft, etc. So many educated fools...
Rating: 2 Votes
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trifid
18 months ago
Skynet is upon us.
Rating: 2 Votes
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LordQ
18 months ago
iPhone XI and iOS 12 goodies.
Rating: 2 Votes
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MH01
18 months ago

Thank you so much for calling it iPhone XI instead of iPhone X2, or any of the other crazy variations I've seen that fail to acknowledge that the "X" is the roman numeral for ten. :D

How about XS , using apples convention
Rating: 1 Votes
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simx34
18 months ago

Apple's obsession with "faces" is creepy. Potential for even more intrusion into our private lives. But young techies always put a "this is so great" spin while ignoring the potentials for MORE technology abuse, hacking, identity theft, etc. So many educated fools...


It's a computer vision AI, how exactly does this lead to more technology abuse? I don't understand you're point.
Rating: 1 Votes
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LinusR
18 months ago

Can't wait for the iPhone 9 and 10.1 Mountain Lion next year. /s


iPhone 10.1 Puma surely.
Rating: 1 Votes
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MRrainer
18 months ago

Shame that you (apple) left many people out of a job in the UK, poaching Imagination Technologies (UK) key staff and steeling their intellectual property to further your own (new) chips.
When you could have easily bought Imagination Technologies.

We wont forget.


Apple doesn't like buying up big companies. Integration would have been a nightmare. And it is in fact a big nightmare in the real world.
Besides, they already had staff doing exactly the same as Imagination Technologies - so that would have only added friction.

But yeah, I do feel sorry for the people who got thrown under the bus. That really sucks.

I think unless you (as a supplier) are doing something really specialized that will never be a core-component, Apple's relationship with you can often be pretty... abusive.

OTOH, management at Imagination Technologies must have seen this coming for a long time.
Rating: 1 Votes

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