About AWS Celebrities

AWS Celebrities is part of Amazon Rekognition, the image and video analysis service from Amazon Web Services. It compares a face in a picture against a database of tens of thousands of well-known public figures and returns a name with a confidence score.

Moments Lab and AWS Celebrities

Your own face database only holds the people someone on your team took the time to add. So a guest star, a presenter from another show or a musician who turned up once stayed invisible to search. AWS Celebrities names them during indexing, so your team types the name and gets the moments back with the timecode. A talent-led compilation becomes an afternoon's work instead of a week's, with the team you already have. Nothing about your setup changes: your high-res files stay where they sit, your team keeps working in Moments Lab, and there is no separate tool to install or run.

How it works

Celebrity recognition runs inside Moments Lab indexing. There is no plugin to install and nothing for your team to run.

What goes to Amazon, and what comes back

We index the proxy, the low-res copy made at ingest, not your high-res original, which stays where it sits. Faces are detected and tracked inside Moments Lab first, not by Amazon. Only frames that contain a face go to Amazon Rekognition. Faces are tracked across a shot, so a name is looked up once per appearance, not once per second. Rekognition returns a name and a confidence score, which we write to the media's timeline with the timecode.

People you never had to add yourself

The face database you build in Thesaurus covers the people your team has created, and no one else. AWS Celebrities sits behind it with a ready-made database of tens of thousands of famous faces, so anyone in it is found and named without you adding them. Amazon keeps adding to that database, so coverage grows on its own. Each recognized name links to its Wikidata entry, which makes the aliases held there searchable too. Search a stage name or a birth name and still land on the moment.

Getting started

Celebrity recognition is switched on per workspace, alongside your own face database, and the confidence threshold can be tuned. Start with one show, check the names against what your editors expect, then index the rest of the catalog.

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