Face recognition and OCR processing of 300 million records from US yearbooks

A yearbook is a type of a book published annually to record, highlight, and commemorate the past year of a school. Our team at MyHeritage took on a complex project: extracting individual pictures, names, and ages from hundreds of thousands of yearbooks, structuring the data, and creating a searchable index that covers the majority of US schools between the years 1890–1979 -- more than 290 million individuals. In this article I'll describe what problems we encountered during this project and how we solved them. First of all, let me explain why we needed to tackle this challenge. MyHeritage is a genealogy platform that provides access to almost 10 billion historical records.