Recognition: helmets
Identify drivers and riders by helmet paint.
When a driver or rider is in a helmet, their face is hidden and their number may be on the car, not on them. Helmet-paint recognition identifies people by the design of their helmet — the one thing that's visible lap after lap — and groups every shot of that helmet together.
Turn it on
On the album's Edit → Workflows page, under People detection, switch on Helmet-paint recognition. Beta Web SnapFlow clusters helmets by their paint signature as photos are ingested.
Helmet clusters
Detected helmets appear as helmet clusters on the People page — each groups the shots that share a paint design, with the helmet crop highlighted on each photo. Open a cluster to:
- Rename it — e.g. "Hamilton — red/black helmet".
- Link this helmet — attach the cluster to an athlete (from your registry, an unnamed face cluster in this album, or a brand-new person), so the helmet and the face describe the same competitor.
- Ignore (bystander) / Unignore — hide helmets that aren't competitors (a marshal, a mechanic) and bring them back if you change your mind.
Where it fits
Helmet paint is the most reliable signal in motorsport and motocross — more so than a face you rarely see or a number that's on the bodywork. Link a helmet to its driver and to the vehicle they drive, and every gallery — by person, by car, by helmet — lines up to the same competitor.
Layer the signals
No single pipeline catches everything. Faces, numbers, kits, vehicles and helmets each cover the frames the others miss — turn on the ones that match your sport and let them reinforce each other.
That completes the recognition pipelines. Next: Metadata & IPTC.