Image recognition is going to be an important part of technology in the coming years, especially when it comes to recognizing faces.  Viewdle, an image recognition service, has announced a $10 million round of investment today, with backers including Best Buy, BlackBerry, Qualcomm and Anthem Venture Partners.

Viewdle is looking to change the facial recognition industry by including it in devices, such as your smartphone.  This diminishes the need to access the cloud, and speeds up the image analysis time.  What this does is organize images at an earlier stage, making them more relevant when included in an album on someone’s PC or the web.

Taking a mobile approach to its facial recognition tools, Viewdle is also appealing to the practicalities of launching such an application.  Smartphones have really helped to drive image recognition technology, and is being incorporated as another factor in things like search and content organization.  What Viewdle is doing is adding another sensory input for individual smartphones, improving their own “brain” instead of a collective one.

Google is also taking several steps towards the incorporation of image recognition for mobile devices, though there’s not a terrible amount being done specifically for facial recognition.  Facebook already has some interesting tactics for tagging faces in its endless sea of photos, though a number of apps like the one from Faces.com aims to automate much of that process.

And so does Viewdle.  Integration on the mobile level also centralizes content based on a user, enabling them to do more with their own content.  We’re sure to see a number of tools launching for device-specific features and functions, adding a great deal of value to our smartphones themselves.  TabbedOut is another example of an app taking a device-specific approach to its consumer offering–the company announced a $2 million round this morning as well.