The next major version of the digiKam photo management software, that is digiKam 7.0, looks promising. The digiKam Team has released their first beta with deep learning powered faces management.

Since the algorithms used in background (not based on deep learning) were older and unchanged since the first revision, the team found them to be “not enough powerful” to facilitate the faces management workflow automatically.

The updated version makes use of the cascade classifier and deep neural network functionality of the OpenCV library to improve face detection big time.

As the digiKam team puts it, “The goal of this project was to left all older ideas and to port the detection and the recognition engines on a more modern deep-learning approaches.”

The digiKam 7.0 Beta also features the updated libraw 0.20 to introduce more than 40 new Raw formats, especially the most recent camera models available on the photo market, including the new Canon CR3 format and the Sony A7R4 (61 Mpx).