In the constant battle for tech supremacy, Google Inc. is reportedly set to work out a deal with Riya, a new online photo service that automatically recognizes human facesso as to beable toprovide the respective namesassociated withthose faces.

The acquisition of the new service, launched just last Friday and still in its beta stage, is said to be valued at around $40 million. The Riya service is said to be one step ahead of other similar services like Flickr and Picasa, a current Google product. The new software is so sophisticated that it is believed to be able to distinguish between photos of twins as well as pictures of individual members of the same family.

Google's interest stems from rival Yahoo Inc's acquisition of Flickr. The new online service from Riya makes use of artificial intelligence and face-recognition technology, attributes that make the product theoretically superior to the capabilities of Flickr.

Riya was founded by Munjal Shah, an Indian who grew up in the Silicon Valley. Shah earned his MS in Computer Science from Stanford and was one of Business Week's Top 10 "Up and Comers" for 2001.

Riya's engineering team is currently working round the clock in an effort to iron out the bugs from its beta release product.