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The Face Detector 241

Posted by Hemos from the line-up-for-the-machine dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "Almost all human faces have common characteristics, such as two eyes and one mouth. Still, some people, affected by face blindness, cannot recognize one face from another one. So it's understandable that face recognition is a major challenge for computer vision systems. In "Facing facts in computer recognition,", the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that a team from Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute has developed a very accurate software to find faces within images. By analyzing only 768 pixels, the system can detect 93 percent of the faces in a set of images while falsely identifying four objects as faces. The Face Detector Demo is available online and you can submit an image for analysis and receive the results by e-mail. The technology will be used for security purposes, but also by digital photography companies who want to automatically reduce "red eye" effects. You'll find more details and references in this overview."
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The Face Detector More

The Face Detector

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  • Maybe they should upload it... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:11AM (#9106966)

    ...to the Mars rovers.

  • Portable face detector (Score:5, Funny)

    by nizo ( 81281 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:13AM (#9106997) Homepage Journal
    What I really want is one that is portable that will whisper the name of people into my ear so I never have to remember anyone's name ever again. Something with hooks into the FBI's most wanted list would be nice too (Hey you just walked by a guy who is worth 2 million if you turn him in).

    • Re:Portable face detector (Score:5, Funny)

      by Cruciform ( 42896 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:17AM (#9107039) Homepage
      Man, that would rock!

      Though it might be a bit disconcerting to the people who observe you screaming "JACKPOT!" and jumping up and down on a seemingly innocent pedestrian.
    • Or it could hook into the "Girls who put out on the first date" list so I know who to hit on at the bar.

    • Re:Portable face detector (Score:5, Informative)

      by Xentax ( 201517 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:25AM (#9107144)
      I think this technology just recognizes faces from backgrounds, it *does not* appear to uniquely identify faces (a la fingerprints).

      Others have tried that, and we all know how monumentally insufficient it has been thus far as a legitimate security tool, in terms of missed matches and a high false-positive to actual positive ratio.

      Xentax

      • Re:Portable face detector (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Lord Agni ( 643860 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:53AM (#9107419)
        Bruce Schneier points out the problem of false positives in his "Secrets and Lies", and you'll get the same argument in any freshman statistics class: If the target population (of identified terrorists in the country, or people with AIDS) is extremely small, the probability of a false positive is greater than the probability of a true positive. If this system is correct 93% of the time, it's wrong 7% of the time. How many terrorists are there in the average metropolitan airport? I'd say zero (on average) How many people would be incorrectly identified? 7%. An airport with, say, 2000 people in it would have 140 of them misidentified. Even if the average airport had 20 terrorists, the false positives or misidentified would greatly outnumber them. And since the system is wrong 7% of the time, one or 2 of those 20 terrorists would be misidentified as not being a terrorist.
      • Look at it from a stepped approach:

        1. Face detection software identifies faces from background.
        2. Face identification software examines multiple aspects, retrieves matching information from database.
        3. System plays back critical information into a hidden earpiece.
        4. (Optional for those with glasses or ocular implants) System displays known face in field of view for confirmation. An advanced system could do the same thing with multiple faces in a background, adding a name over each person as they're identi
      • I don't think this is anything new. I have an IEEE paper here of a group that did a similar system in 2001. There are systems that do face recognition and verification; but nothing with high accuracy (people have been working on this for years using many methods, the main problem is that you need to be facing the camera perfectly straight). Iris and retina recognition, on the other hand, can be done with a relatively high accuracy.

    • That'd be a trip... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:43AM (#9107336) Homepage Journal
      Walk up to someone you never met before, greet him by name, and ask him about all the various details of his life are going that you shouldn't know because you never met him before. It'd be a good way to freak people out, especially of your borg implants aren't particular noticable...
      • This recalls the scene from Snow Crash where Hiro has gone gargoyle and approaches the motorcycle dealership's salesman with just just a line of patter. Loved it.
    • Maybe you could have an optical implant like Geordie in ST:TNG . If the ships's computer can tell where everyone is located, and his eye-visor can provide additional information beyond normal human vision, it wouldn't be too difficult to have the name, rank and status of all people within visual range visible. Maybe as semi-transparent text above or slowly rotating around that person.
    • I just need one that tels me which waitress is mine... Is it just me or do they all look alike???

  • I know... (Score:5, Funny)

    by lcde ( 575627 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:14AM (#9107000) Homepage
    Where's Waldo? :D

  • a real use for this kind of technology (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hype7 ( 239530 ) <u3295110@@@anu...edu...au> on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:14AM (#9107004) Journal
    instead of the endless "let's use it in airports" crap, it looks like they've found a real use for this kind of thing.

    give it to blind people so they can know who they're talking to. But don't stop there - man, the number of times I've forgotten names... it'd be great if they could integrate this kind of thing into some glasses, that popped up the name of the person as you looked at them (assuming, of course, you knew them).

    whoever commercialises that tech first is going to make a lot of $$$, I think...

    -- james

    • Ah, something like glasses with a HUD in them?

      *beep* Jonathan McPherson. Age: 34 Occupation: Busdriver.
      *beep* Ellen Craigh. Age: 27 Occupation: Systems Developer.
      *beep* Unknown woman. Age: Unknown Occupation: Who cares? I'd hit it!

      I sense business potential if one can add random data as well!

    • Re:a real use for this kind of technology (Score:5, Funny)

      by Doesn't_Comment_Code ( 692510 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:23AM (#9107120)
      give it to blind people so they can know who they're talking to

      Two guys walk into a convenient store.

      Angry man 1: "Empty the cash register into this back now mutha f'er!"

      Angry man 2: "Get down! _shots-fired-into-air_ All of you Get down on the floor!"

      Face recognition computer to blind man: "You are now speaking to Ronald Reagan and Ronald Reagan."
    • "instead of the endless "let's use it in airports" crap,"

      The "use it in airports 'crap'" happens because they're trying to get gov't funding to continue development. It's not crap to try to get ahead in this world by fulfilling a need. Don't like it? Point at Uncle Sam instead of the company trying to earn money.

      *Note: I'm talking in general, not specifically about this company.
    • I remember a Scientific American where they were at an MIT AI lab where they had something pretty close.

      Everyone wears a little pin radio transmitter, then when you are looking at a person, a special set of glasses you wear pops up their name in the lower right corner. Not enough to really see, but enough to help spark name recognition.

      So they got out of the face recognition problem, which seems harder than it's really worth.

      Doug
    • give it to blind people so they can know who they're talking to

      Have you never had someone say "Hi" after calling you on the phone.... and known who it is?
    • Sorry.... Blind people know who they are talking to, because generally they don't need to know them by their face, just by their voice. Since they cannot see (and many have never seen ever) they develop a sense of what is going on around them with their other senses.

      Now when the blind can listen to a speach imparied person by way of sign language recognition, that would be cool.

      Presumably the blind person could talk to a hearing imparied person by way of voice recognition software printing out what is sa
    • give it to blind people so they can know who they're talking to

      I suspect blind people use the same method I do for telling people apart, the sound of a person's voice.

  • Old news (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Geoffd1 ( 466931 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:15AM (#9107018) Homepage
    This is old news - software that finds faces has been available for years. To cite an older example, the company Miros, which later became TrueFace - they used a neural-net approach.
    • This is old news - software that finds faces has been available for years.

      Yeah, but face-recognition has never worked very well. Whether this does or not is yet to be seen.

  • Face detector (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sotonboy ( 753502 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:16AM (#9107035)
    I dont get the point ? It doesnt recognise faces, just tells you if theres one there. Thats not exactly state of the art is it ? When other companies are producing systems that can identify people from images, albeit inaccurately.

    • Let me explain... (Score:5, Informative)

      by fingerfucker ( 740769 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @11:05AM (#9107534)

      I am no expert in this technology, but I am somewhat knowledgable about it, let me explain something.

      You won't understand how hard is it to actually pull off something like face recognition until you yourself actually sit down and try it, only to realize that the problem is much more complex to solve when it has to be so all-encompasing.

      The first step to face recognition is to recognize where the face is. The result of this process are quadrilaterals that carve out the face so that when you crop, you are left with exactly the face (frontal, or profile view or other).

      A common technique used to do that is to locate the eyes. Most faces (heck, even those with veils on them for relegious reasons!) will contain eyes. Then, when detecting where the face is, you are only left with not having covered people who are wearing sunglasses (which are much easier to detect).

      After you have located the eyes, you gauge by their proportions the approximate proportions of the face. Then, you apply an iterative technique (varies in principle, typically based on differential calculus combined with numerical methods of approximation) to locate the bounds of the face so you can eventually crop it to know WHERE THE FACE IS.

      "Obviously", the iterative technique has to be able to detect false positives via a threshold set that will rule out the non-face. However, once you have located the eyes with certain reliability, the overall chance that you have come across a face is pretty solid.

      The problem is complicated as it is already as you can see!!

      Only after FINDING the face, you can start MATCHING the face. At that point you are facing a number of problems that the imagination of most /.-ers can conceive of... Bierds, smiles, teeth-showing, frowns, skin tone changes and the most popular by all scientist: plastic surgery....

      A common approach to the actual face matching is a technique of the so-called eigenfaces, whereby you compute a "common" face of the pool and then you can navigate down the specialization of characteristics (e.g. bigger, bigger, bigger nostrils) as you drill down, narrowing down the pool of possible faces.

      There is nothing that takes away from how much state-of-the-art CMU's research is. It would be like saying "why is someone dealing with virtual memory management of an operating system if by now, we already have user applications for the OS". Do you see the flaw in such thinking?

      The science behind is a lot of mathematics, so dear parent, please don't be ignorant of this type of work just because you don't understand its complexities...

  • Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Doesn't_Comment_Code ( 692510 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:17AM (#9107038)
    ...while falsely identifying four objects as faces.

    That's interesting. The AI is sufficient to identify most faces. And it sees a few faces where none exists - not unlike people. Little kids point out when their bananas, carrots and peas line up just right to make a face. If they see it, why shouldn't a computer? What about the moon? Would this software see a face there? A man maybe?

    There is no point to this, just interesting thoughts that struck me while reading.

    • "Normal" infants recognize faces very quickly. It seems to be "instinct".

      I think this is a little fuzzier than most people make it out to be, and really odd if done in 2d still shots.

      If you show a computer a photo of some guy sitting down at a desk and ask "is this a face?", what you're really asking is... "is this a two-dimensional still projection of a three-dimensional space which contains a partial image of a face which is probably of an object which appears to be that of a human?"

      I think project

    • For that matter, probably most people identify non-faces that look like faces by context. If you can tell there's no body attached, it's probably not a face. In order to figure that out, however, you need to understand things in front of other things, how much space a body takes up, how it bends, etc.

  • Gender Recognition (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Black Rabbit ( 236299 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:18AM (#9107052)
    Can it differentiate between a male face and that of a female? Besides the obvious facial hair thing, what makes the two different anyway?

    • Gender and race show the limits of this (and us) (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ianscot ( 591483 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:52AM (#9107418)
      The subtle stuff that tells you which faces are male and female doesn't have an objective truth behind it. There is no concrete set of criteria you can rely on in making those judgments, it's just a set of rough truths you work with to get by. You can't always make a good guess, there are borderline cases: to use your own intended-to-be-obvious example, some women have lots more facial hair than others.

      There's no way for this process to reliably determine something like race, either -- not that doing so is that desirable anyway. The characteristics that make up "an African American guy" are just not nearly as concrete as we think they are from day to day. I have a neighbor who thinks all the Somali people in my area are "Arabs." Her category is a little too broad. It seems to me like she's forcing certain expressions onto their faces, too, as part of her image of what "Arabs" are like.

      People's minds love to categorize. Sometimes, a lot of the time, we force information into categories it doesn't quite fit. (Refer to: State Department intelligence from Iraqi exile organizations.) Even when the information is essentially noise, we try to sort it and sift it. As a result we persist in holding weird ideas: astrology, because the paper tells us something vague and we run the events we see past that filter.

      We should expect our tools to share some of those biases and blind spots. As much as we might try to address that, we have the blind spots ourselves, so it's hard to know how to counter the problem.

    • I suspect that the shape of the jaw and cheekbones would be the obvious thing. There are probably sets of measurements which can be plugged into a formula to give a maleness/femaleness index.
    • Male / Female Facial Differences [virtualffs.co.uk]

      While we are at it...

      Male / Female Skeletal Differences [frashii.com]

      Obviously, the pelvis has a lot of differences. :-)
    • female faces have tits underneath. Duh.

  • Give Me a Break (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I can't tell people apart sometimes. I have a VERY hard time remembering someone's name, especially when they're Person #12 I Met On The Tour Of The Office out of The 37 People I Met On My First Day.

    But am I afflicted with "Face Blindness"? NO! I have a shitty memory for faces, and that's it! I don't have some made-up malady that can be cured with thousands of dollars of useless medication advertised on TV!

    The technology sounds cool. The culture of euphemism in the US just pisses me off, that's all.

    • "Face Blindness" (Score:5, Informative)

      by raygundan ( 16760 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:55AM (#9107441) Homepage
      While I agree with you about the general "culture of euphemism," as you put it-- I don't think this is one of those times. Face Blindness is not referring to people like you and me who are just lousy at remembering who we met, but rather people with profound neurological disorders who *literally* cannot tell a face from something vaguely facelike, like a vase or a particular arrangement of shadows. This goes far beyond not remembering the guy you met at a convention a year ago-- but rather not even being able to tell the difference between his face and the PDA he was holding.

      For a quick read on it, check out The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat [amazon.com]. The things that happen to the poor people in this book as a result of disease, physical damage to the brain, or conditions they were born with are bizarre but definitely interesting.
      • I am mixing up a couple of different conditions in my previous post. (It has been eight years since I read that book last)

        I believe what the article was referring to was prosopagnosia. This condition has people able to tell a face from a vase, but unable to tell one face from another. The condition I was referring to I can't find the proper name for, but is more severe still, and may have been limited to the few cases for which the book I mentioned was named.
    • Face Blindness is an actual condition, not just a shitty memory for names. Recognizing other people's faces is a big, very early step in the evolution of humans as social creatures, and it's an ability that's severely stunted in some people's brains.

      An example of the difference: I teach at a community college. I have a poor memory for names. By the end of the term I have trouble remembering more than a couple dozen of my 120 or so students' names. Someone with face blindness wouldn't be able to recogn

    • Re:Give Me a Break (Score:5, Insightful)

      by egomaniac ( 105476 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @12:33PM (#9108399) Homepage
      I don't have full-blown face blindness, but I'm not terribly far away.

      If two people look vaguely similar, I have tremendous difficulty telling them apart. I don't mean "they could be twins" similar either -- even "they could be second cousins" can seriously throw me off. I can meet a person, spend twenty minutes talking to that person, walk away and come back, and be completely unable to pick that person out of a small crowd. Depending upon how "average" the person's face was, I might not even experience any sense of familiarity at all when looking at them.

      You learn other tricks for recognizing people after a while. I usually note what people are wearing, so that if I run into them again the same day I have a good shot at recognizing them. Hair color and style help a lot, and tend to remain constant for a substantial time. I'm also very good at identifying voices, so I often wait to hear a person speak before I feel confident that I have correctly identified them. I also rely on my wife to help me remember people a lot -- fortunately she's healthy in this regard, and very understanding of the difficulty I have.

      To give you an idea of how bad things are, a long time ago I was away on business for two months. My girlfriend (now my wife) and I had been together for two years at that point, but I hadn't seen her during those two months.

      She had changed her hairstyle while I was away, so when I got off the plane I didn't recognize her. I noticed this girl smiling at me, and I thought she looked sort of like my girlfriend, but it wasn't until I was within five feet of her that I was sure it was her.

      Can you imagine dating a girl for two years, and then having trouble recognizing her after a mere two-month absence? And I don't have face blindness. I just have moderate difficulty identifying people, compared to the full-blown disorder.

      So, yes, call it a "culture of euphamism" all you like, but I certainly believe that this is a real disability that affects real people.

  • another study says.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by KReilly ( 660988 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:22AM (#9107097)
    face-blindness has a direct correlation to breast size...

  • MED Award (Score:5, Funny)

    by sssmashy ( 612587 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:22AM (#9107100)

    Though face detection is easy for most people, some suffer a perplexing disorder called face blindness, or prosopagnosia, which is an inability to discern the differences between faces...One such sufferer, who is part of a research study by Behrmann, can't recognize his own children when he picks them up from day care. He relies on the day care workers to bring his children to him; failing that, he carries a "cheat sheet" of photographs that can help him make out who's who.

    We just found a candidate for the Most Embarassing Dad of the Year Award!

    Dad: Hi, I'm here to pick up my son, Billy.

    Day Care Worker: Sure, which one is he?

    Dad: Uhhh... (pulls out photograph) I think he's the one one the left... no wait, in the middle. I'm not really sure.

    Day Care Worker: Uh, OK, sir, whatever you say. Let me just leave the room and, uh, get Billy. (leaves room, dials 9-1-1. A few minutes pass)

    Kid at Daycare: Hey Billy! The cops are arresting your dad again!

    • Re:MED Award (Score:4, Interesting)

      by physick ( 146658 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:26AM (#9107150) Journal
      Almost all human faces have common characteristics, such as two eyes and one mouth.

      The "almost" reminds me of the joke: "Do you know that you have more than the average number of legs?

      Some people have lost one or both legs, but no one has three or more. So the average number of legs is slightly less than two."

  • A Good Tool for WOT (Score:2, Interesting)

    by USAPatriot ( 730422 )
    I'm surprised this technology isn't in more widespread use today. Casinos are known to have implemented face-recognition technology to recognize cheater and card counters and bar them.

    If something like this were installed in airports, bus terminals, landmarks, and other public places, we could have a very effective way of stopping potential suicide bombers, terrorists or other evildoers in their tracks. What if the video camera that captured Mohammed Atta had been linked to face-recognition software tha

    • Re:A Good Tool for WOT (Score:2, Interesting)

      by xystren ( 522982 )

      If something like this were installed in airports, bus terminals, landmarks, and other public places, we could have a very effective way of stopping potential suicide bombers, terrorists or other evildoers in their tracks.

      But at the bolded places now, they are already doing this (perhaps with out the face recognition). Ever tried to go to the Sears or the CN Tower or even a ride at an amusement park where they have there "let's take a picture of you, so we can try and sell it to you" after your tour/tri

  • Conspiracy? (Score:4, Funny)

    by baudilus ( 665036 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:24AM (#9107122)
    ...you can submit an image for analysis and receive the results by e-mail.

    So now they can link my face to my e-mail address? No thanks.

  • It'll break! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Doesn't_Comment_Code ( 692510 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:26AM (#9107145)

    I bet it breaks if you pass it a test image of Michael Jackson.

  • Only to recognize where faces are...but good (Score:5, Interesting)

    by icekillis ( 777986 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:33AM (#9107216)
    The algorithm only recognizes where the face is. It does NOT recognize the face to match it with another picture.
    The algorithm is almost scary, watch this [cmu.edu] sample
    http://vasc.ri.cmu.edu/demos/faceindex/05062004/us ers/2236.html [cmu.edu]

    The problem is that even if you can recognize where this 80 pixel face is, it will be very hard to match it up against features of known people. Several [automated] face recognition systems implemented in Florida failed. In more than 3? months they failed to identify a single known offender.
  • I can't quite figure out this statement:

    By analyzing only 768 pixels, the system can detect 93 percent of the faces in a set of images while falsely identifying four objects as faces.

    Is it - four objects in a specific set of images, or four specific objects.

    for example

    • all 'insert object here' objects are mistaken for faces
    • or is it only four random objects in this specific set
    • The dataset they are probably using is the CMU+MIT hard face detection dataset available here (link to 30 meg tar file at bottom of page): http://vasc.ri.cmu.edu/idb/html/face/frontal_imag e s/ This dataset is made of images that contain static, contain faces at unique angles, contain complex scenery which would mess up the way most face detection algorithms work, and more "hard" cases. It's the dataset that all face detection programs are tested against. If I remember correctly most other face detection
  • So, if this picture [gostape.co.nz] is detected as a face, does that count as correct, or not? I submitted it, so we'll see what they get.
  • I see they have a list of previous submissions. I wonder how long it'll be before someone submits goatse man.
  • Email address: bob@yahoo.com
    URL: www.geocities.com/bob/me.jpg
    Are you a criminal? _____
  • Not the first attempt at the problem:
    http://franck.fleurey.free.fr/FaceDetection/index. htm [fleurey.free.fr]

  • An online-DEMO of some NEWER stuff (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ControlFreal ( 661231 ) * <niek@@@bergboer...net> on Monday May 10, 2004 @10:56AM (#9107453) Journal

    Seriously, that's old. I'm a computer vision Ph.D. student, and there now are much faster methods. I'll just refer to my old comment [slashdot.org].

    A demo can be found here [unimaas.nl]. You can contact me for more details...

    Current really fast methods use cascades of very simple classifier that are very weak themselves, but very strong when combined. The work of Viola & Jones [psu.edu] is what most of the stuff is centered around nowadays.

    Do your own here:

    http://argus.cs.unimaas.nl/fddemo

  • Ugh broken logic (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Elwood P Dowd ( 16933 ) <judgmentalist@gmail.com> on Monday May 10, 2004 @11:21AM (#9107688) Journal
    Still, some people, affected by face blindness, cannot recognize one face from another one. So it's understandable that face recognition is a major challenge for computer vision systems.

    Face blindness just shows us that the specialized hardware we have for face recognition is so incredibly accurate that we rely on it completely and have no alternate methods of face recognition. When it's broken, other parts of our brain don't step in either because a) it's a hard task or b) they just don't have access to the relevant visual information. Face recognition could be totally simple, if this were our only measure.
  • I wonder if there are open-source/academic projects that are in relation to this. I've been testing GSPY and some other security camera software as of late. If you could do testing on this type of software and coincide with facial recog, there could be a lot of useful things that have nothin to do with homeland security and the like. (such as having a computer system activate off standby from facial recognition at a certain point). So I like science fiction... don't we all.
    • Most of this research falls into two categories: Government-funded work at universities, and private research by companies looking to sell a commercial product. While it is near impossible to get developers on commercial systems to disclose their algorithm details, the publicly funded stuff is usually available for anyone who wants to take the time to leaf through PAMI or any number of other technical journals. Universities study this stuff with publication as a primary goal, so it's just a matter of knowin
  • We aren't computers, yet we sometimes look at the wall or the ceiling or the stars and pick out faces. Many people have scared themselves badly seeing a face in the dark woods or looking in a window at night.
  • Finally! Proof that Bush is two-faced!
    http://vasc.ri.cmu.edu/demos/faceindex/06272001/us ers/91.html [cmu.edu]
  • You really need to appreciate what is going on here...

    Face detection, as any detection task, requires that a class of object be identified. This doesn't mean we have a picture, and ask, "is it a face?". It means we have a 640x480 image, say, and 5 scales, and want to ask which of the ~1,500,000 possible locations is a face.

    To say that there are a few false detections means that this detector has a false positive rate of O(1)/O(10^6), which is awesome.

    There is a natural trade off between detection rate an

  • Wow! (Score:3, Funny)

    by The Spoonman ( 634311 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @12:57PM (#9108657) Homepage
    Once this thing works, I'll be able to Google for porn done by my favorite actresses, regardless of correct file names! YAAY!!

  • Names to faces? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by TXP ( 592446 )
    My problem remembering people's names stems from the countless hours playing video games. In video games the characters don't have feelings so it doesn't matter if you remember their name or not. So I tend not to remember their names but what they function/occuption is. So if someone tells me they are George the CEO of the company I work at. I'll remember that he's the CEO of the company but not his name.

  • Realtime Verification (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @01:14PM (#9108859) Homepage Journal
    As you upload your images to your PC, it verifies you havent taken any pictures of 'banned' individuals... Such as movie stars...

    If you have, it deletes the image, and e-mails the MPAA.

    Though I'm joking, there is room for such abuse once you have to be authenticated even to view your own images.

  • Ask an artist (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JGski ( 537049 ) on Monday May 10, 2004 @01:36PM (#9109051) Journal
    The funny thing is you can tell what matters for facial recognition by just asking or being an artist. Anyone who's done drawn or painted portraiture knows that it's the eyes, then mouth, and then nose that defines a recognizable face. The "proof" of concept is how you can draw a face with as few as 4 or 5 curved lines and the face is utterly recognizable. This is akin to Douglas Hofstadter's article "Letter Spirit" in "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" [amazon.com] which talks about what gives an image of a letter 'a', it all it's possible fonts and glyphs, its recognizable "letter-a-ness" or letter spirit as an 'a'.

    Most of the "insights" about facial recognition in the article would probably elicit a collective "well, duh, that's been known for hundreds of years" from artists (it does from me). BTW I identified all four faces correctly from the side-bar - being an artist let's you actually "see" the world rather "project" the world.

    JG

  • Augmented (Score:2, Funny)

    by Uruviel ( 772554 )
    I'll have that feature augmented the next time I got surgery. "Who's that?" *program initiated* "That is your ex wife, reccomend 500meter distance from target" A nice female voice tells me.

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