Edit faces directly from the face manager

[Mees Dekker]

In the face manager for a certain person I select all (confirmed or unconfirmed) faces. Some of these are shown as a question mark. See screenshot. When I then enlarge a picture with a questionmark, it shows that the face annotation is not on a face, but somewhere in the picture; hence the question mark (I suppose).
 
It would be very nice to be able to correct that misplaced annotation directly. But that is not possible at this moment. So you have to switch to the viewer (after remembering where this file/picture was located), open it in the viewer, adjust the face annotation and then start the face manager again for the next misplaced annotation.
 
So therefore this request: could there be a possibility to be able to adjust the annotations (directly from the facemanager, like it is in de viewer).
 
Perhaps this could be done to insert in the dashboard (under the quality tab) a group for "questionmarked faces".

[Mario]

This icon is used when no face could be detected for a face annotation and there is also no thumbnail. This is unusual. Not a regular face annotation and not a manual face annotation and not a link.

How do you create these face annotations? Are they imported from something, like a phone or camera?

[Mees Dekker]

Sadly, I cannot tell how this came about. Tried to reproduce some of this, but no avail. It may have started with linking all files in a certaincategory to a person(since I was using categories for people prior the introduction of the people-/facemanager). 

However, if there would be some way to select them (or i.e. assign them to a collection or anything else), it would be very helpful. 

Hope you some idea's on this? 

Did anybody else experience this phenomena?

[Mario]

Apple devices had a problem (or have it still) where these devices stored a face annotation in the XMP record with a width and height of 0. Apple "dealt" with that in their own software, but kept the broken XMP record in the files.

IMatch has a work-around for that for a while, but maybe you have imported these files before the bug fix was rolled out?
Are these annotations visible in the Viewer? Do these annotations have a width and height > 0?
Or maybe a specific tag?
If you can "grab" the annotation via a variable (or tag) you can filter for that variable or tag to find these broken annotations.

[Mees Dekker]

These pictures were certainly not imported from any Apple device.

 These annotations are indeed visible in the viewer. I'll look into this a bit further but any practcal clues or help would be appreciated very much.

[sinus]

Sorry, Mees, if I could, I would help.

Hope, that someone can help.

[Tveloso]

Mees, hopefully this can save you a little time in getting the file containing one of those "bad faces", opened in the Viewer, so as to correct it:

    If you select one of those faces in Face Manager, then click Goto->Folder:
   
        
   
    ...IMatch will open the Media & Folders View with the required file focused.  You can then close Face
    Manager, and press enter to send that file to the Viewer.

Unfortunately you must do this for each of the faces that lack a thumbnail, one-at-a-time...but perhaps some of the files in question will be near each other, and you can correct several of those faces in one Viewer session.

When I then enlarge a picture with a questionmark, it shows that the face annotation is not on a face, but somewhere in the picture; hence the question mark (I suppose)

I recall that in the early days of Face recognition in IMatch, this was an issue...(that a Face Thumbnail sometimes did not properly contain the Face, and sometimes that thumbnail image - and what was shown in the integrated Viewer in Face Manager - did not match the Annotation, as it appeared in the Viewer)...although I don't think I recall any that lacked a face thumbnail as you have shown.  Is it possible that these faces you're seeing were created in older versions of IMatch?

[Mario]

These pictures were certainly not imported from any Apple device.

 These annotations are indeed visible in the viewer. I'll look into this a bit further but any practcal clues or help would be appreciated very much.

OK, the annotations have non-zero dimensions.
They are placed at non-faces (normal, can occasionally happen if an "object" is detected wrongly as a face) but no thumbnail was stored for them in the database (not normal).
Does the database diagnosis report any warnings or errors?

Do these annotations have a label / tag showing under the annotation?

If not, you should be able to find them with a Variable Filter in the Filter Panel.
Use the variable {File.Persons.Tag} and select the Database Node in the Media & Folders View.
This will list all unique tags, and the problem annotations should list as <<No Data>>.
Checking this entry will show all affected files and you can process them in the Viewer.
Or just select them and delete all face annotations (context menu in the File Window) and then re-create them if needed.

[Mees Dekker]

It is a bit more complicated than it seemed. Database diagnosis reports no warnings and/or errors. 

When I use the suggestion by Mario, I get all pictures in my entire database without any data in {File.Persons.Tag}. That also includes all landscape, architecture pictures etc. So not a viable solution.

When I enlarge a "question marked" face from the face manager, it shows a green rectangle in the upper right corner of the picture. This is where normally a blue link annotation is positioned. When I then open this picture in the viewer, it shows the face annotation at the right position (i.e. over the correct face). If this annotation is then moved, resized (or in any way touched) and confirmed; the question mark in the face manager is gone and replaced with a correct thumbnail. 

It seems that this occurs on those images that had a "link annotation", which was converted into a "normal annotation" (Ctrl M, N) and after that the annotation was manually moved from the upper right corner to the right face. Or the other way around: first moved to right face and after that converted into an "normal" annotation. 

[Mario]

Strange.
I've tried both methods, and a thumbnail was always created.
I don't recall any similar problem reports either.

[Mees Dekker]

Well: thanks for all the help and suggestions. The last thing I can think of, is that not all changes (in these annotations) had been written to the database or into the file, when Imatch crashed for some reason. That happens sometimes, very rarely but about once a month.

I'm working on a Dell workstation, but do a lot of tasks at the same time. Usually I have about 10 applications running simultaniously, computer is connected to a 20Tb NAS (Imatch is on the internal SSD drive).

I'll have to live with this and over time I can correct them manually. Not a big problem, but certainly time consuming.

[Mario]

When IMatch crashes, does it produce a Debug Dump File and can you upload it and send me a link.
IMatch should not crash, and having the DUMP file of one of the crashes you experience here in my lab may help me fix the problem.

IMatch extracts and stores the thumbnail immediately after you place, move or resize the face annotation. No explicit "save" is required. If the crash happens between you moving the annotation and IMatch saving the thumbnail to the database and Windows actually writing the data to the disk, the thumbnail might get lost. But that's many "ifs" and you have not only one of these empty annotations but apparently many. Very strange...no idea really.

[Mees Dekker]

The last time Imatch stopped working (did not crash) was Feb 4th. Luckily I could recover a log file. Also a diagnosis logfile from one day later. No debug file was created. 

Just noticed something else: in the peopletab a certain number of confirmed faces is shown for somebody. But when opening the facemanager (F4) the number of faces (Show all faces and deactivated "current scope") is considerably lower (a difference of several 100's). Can't tell whether the number of "question marks" is the same as the "missing" number of faces.

Would running "Rebuild visual query data" and/or "Convert face annotations from Imatch 2019 or older.." be helpful?

[Mario]

Would running "Rebuild visual query data" and/or "Convert face annotations from Imatch 2019 or older.." be helpful?

No. Unrelated.

The log file is clean, ending with a regular IMatch shut-down that was not completed. If you experienced a crash in that session, but no debug DUMP file, IMatch was terminated by Windows for some reason...? The typical reasons for this would be some external module or driver or WIC codec loaded into the IMatch address space crashed or caused something that Windows did not like. Since the IMatch crash handler was not triggered, it's something external either way.

The IMatch diagnosis did not find any error.

There is a diagnosis step that checks for faces which have a) vector data (from the face recog) but no thumbnail. Since the thumbnail always comes first (this is the extracted face the IMatch AI works with to determine if there is a face), the other case is not possible.

If a face annotation is deliberately moved outside an image, no thumbnail can be generated, no face can be recognized. But you said that the annotations look normal, have dimensions and are placed inside the image data.

When IMatch finds a face annotation without associated face data record, it logs a warning to the log file and the diagnosis would also report this with a warning. But not in your case.

Let me know if you somehow figure out under which condition this happens. I have not seen this before and there are no related bug reports. Which makes this kinda unique and hard to diagnose.

[Mees Dekker]

Thanks for all the time you spend on this peculiar phenemena. Let it rest. 

And if I come across some clue, I'll be in contact again.