Computers Outperform Humans at Recognizing Faces 183
seven of five writes "According to the recent Face Recognition Grand Challenge, The match up of face-recognition algorithms showed that machine recognition of human individuals has improved tenfold since 2002 and a hundredfold since 1995. 'Among other advantages, 3-D facial recognition identifies individuals by exploiting distinctive features of a human face's surface--for instance, the curves of the eye sockets, nose, and chin, which are where tissue and bone are most apparent and which don't change over time. Furthermore, Phillips says, "changes in illumination have adversely affected face-recognition performance from still images. But the shape of a face isn't affected by changes in illumination." Hence, 3-D face recognition might even be used in near-dark conditions.'"
ORLY? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:ORLY? (Score:4, Funny)
in other news (Score:2, Funny)
Re:in other news (Score:5, Insightful)
Recognition tasks are almost all inductive in nature, where performance on math is deductive. Human induction pretty well spanks machine induction at most of the things we take for granted - like recognizing and decoding faces, voices, speech, the sound of your walk, etc., etc., etc. The thing computers do least well is infer what bits of information are most important. We seem to excel at that.
Despite what the findings say, I stand by the faces thing. It sounds like the recognition algorithms got high-resolution 3D scans of human faces as input. Wake me when they can do as well as a human with low-resolution 2D scans.
That being said, it's great to see progress in this area. I can't wait until someone has to lop off my head and carry it with them in a plastic bag in order to break into my workplace. It's more grisly than taking a thumb, but much less likely to happen... I think...
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Great, now commercialize it.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Great, now commercialize it.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Great, now commercialize it.. (Score:5, Insightful)
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-275313.html [com.com]
http://www.frvt.org/FRVT2002/default.htm [frvt.org]
I included the long list of agencies because under Homeland Security they will undoubtably share databases. If you have been scanned, everyone has your facial recognition file and fingerprints. I tried to stand out of the camera view, but there was no good way to aviod walking past it. The customs guy did alot of typing when I came in, probably as it was my first time in front of a facial recognition camera. My girlfriend was practically waved through, but she had been though customs just a year ago, as so probably already has a file.
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Thanks for the info.
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Will somebody please explain to me why every time some new way to do anything that would involve identifying people, it's an invasion of privacy? I mean honestly, why are you so afraid? What crime did you commit now?
Re:Great, now commercialize it.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The freedom of assembly is what's at stake, and it in turn is essential for a free democracy. If the government can track the movements of innocent people, then it can monitor the organizations and associations (including political) that one is associated with. And if the government has the power to document the members of every rival political movement as it is forming, including all the other activities of the members, then they have the power to intimidate and crush it. (Don't believe me? Find a history book.)
Privacy from the government is a key component of freedom, because it places serious constraints on the government's power over the people. Without this, you can very easily become a subject rather than a free citizen.
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When you know that someobody could be observing your every move and you don't know exactly when you are being specifically observed, your behavior will change to what you believe the observer wants.
Only if the observer has the power to impose their will on you. I can stand on a street corner and say I hate the government as loudly as I want, and I don't care if they have a camera watching me. The moment they get the power to lock me up for saying I hate them is the moment that the freedom goes away, not when they put the camera up.
I read an interesting piece on two different types of surveillance society a while back. The first one had state/police cameras recording everything and everywhere, and b
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And I bet there will be no cameras and microphones in any high-level government office streaming content to the general people as thi
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the quality of being secluded from the presence or view of others
the condition of being concealed or hidden
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
And how do you define investigation?
the work of inquiring into something thoroughly and systematically
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
So which of these two definitions would more accurately describe having facial recognition software observing you?
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Trust me, this will become product. Walking through downtown London, you will get recognized. They already have your passport photo.
I hope I've been able to put your mind at ease.
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Re:Great, now commercialize it.. (Score:5, Informative)
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Surveillance soceity. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Surveillance soceity. (Score:5, Insightful)
If scientists ever paused to think for the possibilities of potential abuse of their intellectual effort, progress as we know it would come to a grinding halt. Back to Neanderthal times...
It relies on the ordinary people to safeguard their societies from degenerating but that is an entire different subject (requires getting off the couch alot), and since I can already see the political-zombies approaching to offer their caned insight into the matter it's time for me to split...
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Back to Neanderthal times...
I'm afraid moving forward to Neande
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Re:Surveillance soceity. (Score:5, Insightful)
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security possibilities (Score:2, Interesting)
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And yes, the exact same technology could be used to horrific effect by a police state.
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Yeah, I can see how police states would want to persecute people who correct anti-American propaganda. All the more reason to overthrow their governments and hang their despotic leaders.
Re:security possibilities (Score:4, Funny)
Face the Consequences (Score:4, Interesting)
When computers mis-ID a face, do we cross-examine and maybe punish its programmers?
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If this were to be used for criminal identification, I'm sure that when they get a "hit" for a wanted suspect, that they're going to manually sift through the video, in order to figure out direction of travel etc.
These things aren't error proof, and never will be. A jury would also probably be more sawyed by seeing part of the footage than just having a prosecutor say "the computer said it was him."
If I were an (innocent) suspect, I'd much rather that I was tagged by a computer, since the vid
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Why do you give our justice system, which has recently incorporated even more egregious abuses (like discarding Habeas Corpus), the benefit of t
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Politician: Can the technobabble, nerd. Roll it out. We need to catch us some t'rists.
Leftist Media: "Middle-Eastern man unfairly jailed, tortured"
Politician: Sue the programmers! Damn geeks. Technology is evil!
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The rest you got right. Except the part where the media doesn't report the programmer's warning or the politician ignoring it.
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In reality, have you ever heard of cctv cameras? Do their manufactures get punished? How is this any different?
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Conversely, I think that trusting authorities with the track records we know about to never let these machines make automatic decisions with
No worries... (Score:5, Funny)
Had to say it... (Score:2, Insightful)
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I, for one, welcome
HELLO ECTOTHERM.
our face-recog... um. Hello.
My Plugin (Score:4, Funny)
RingBell();
}
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if(hot_gurl) {
RingBell();
}
I believe you have your bells and whistles [catb.org] mixed up.
A little embarrassed to admit this (Score:5, Funny)
Ageing? (Score:2, Interesting)
it's in the summary FFS (Score:5, Informative)
Geez.
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The movie 'Hostel' demonstrated that this can be defeated with a blow torch.
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Oh intertron, you are a wealth of practical information. :D
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As for puberty, sure the curvature will change while the skull is still forming, but even by early teens things are mostly set.
Really thick facial hair that totally obscures the outline of your head plus oversize glasses that obscure your eye sockets and brow ridges would defeat it, but that hairy bastard with glam-rock shades is going to stic
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Searching google images shows the diversity of things called 'headscarf'. The word covers garments ranging from little more than a headband to the complete head covering a women in Taliban controlled afghanistan would wear.
Re:Ageing? (Score:5, Funny)
Hopefully better than I am, otherwise they better be damn good at making generic bullshit small talk at family parties while sweating profusely and fishing for hints without letting on they have absolutely no idea who it is that just ambused them at the buffet table.
Actually, the opposite situation is just as bad. I have enough of a problem with my 'aunt's old room-mate' or equivilant telling me they "remeber me when I was just 'this' big" (given the amount of random old women that at some point 'changed my diaper' I have begun to wonder if my parents rented me out as a training aid), I do not need the computer hardware in my life pulling the same act!
Either way.... this will end badly.
Hmmm... (Score:2)
If my friend, who has no facial hair, puts on a fake mustache, I can still tell that it's my friend.
Will an algorithm be able to distinguish fake markings?
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Again, it's IN THE SUMMARY.
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And cheap plastic surgery application will skyrocket; not with the goal to become 'prettier'.
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In the BBC documentary series "The Face" the former python John Cleese put on a dress, hat and sunglasses and walked down the street with a silly walk. Everyone recognised him but none of the face recognition algorithms in use at the time could. The sunglasses removing information about the eyes baffled the best of the things available after he put those on. Humans could still identify him with ease so th
Hmmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
ORLY? (Score:3, Interesting)
so, apparently, plastic surgery doesn't exist.
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YA RLY (Score:2)
Now, would the computer be able to catch all of this? The after in relation to the before?
I'm lucky (Score:4, Interesting)
I think I have about ten years 'till computers are able to interpret my front-head as a 'face' so I'm safe.
Since you asked, you can have it... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Since you asked, you can have it... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep, it can back up any claim.
For example, dinosaurs co-existed with humans [google.com].
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You're still welcome to wear a mask anywhere you want (well, perhaps except in banks)
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Not that impressive (Score:4, Informative)
If "better" is based on the standards of humans (fastest good enough guess) rather than machines (as correct as possible, complete & in depth), humans win.
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Translation: Throw enough hardware at it, and the machines win? Whatever a computer has been successfully programmed to do, it's usually bloody fast at it. It sounds like a well parallelizable task that should scale easily for many years to come.
In related news... (Score:3, Informative)
Google seems to be deploying something similar [arstechnica.com]
.Quite impressive.. (Score:5, Interesting)
A few years back (well, nearly a decade actually), I did my master's thesis in a lab that among other things did work on face recognition. The experts there assured me that perhaps in 50 years or so computers might be able to approach human face recognition capabilities. Apparently the development was far quicker than they could have imagined.
An interesting technical point is that in fact the algorithms haven't changed a lot since then - it's still mainly various adaptive systems such as neural networks [wikipedia.org] and support vector machines [wikipedia.org]. The really big breakthrough is in the data collection - in the sensors and scanners. What they couldn't imagine a decade ago was the type of accurate automatic 3d face modeling and measurements that can be done today. It's also how certain computing methods that were deemed unsuitable a few years ago are coming back big time (neural nets for instance). I guess the time wasn't ready for them the last time due to computing power and memory limitations (and of course sensors as in this case).
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Condense Facts from the Vapors of Nuance (Score:2)
But people have other qualities which will prove more resistant to computer analysis.
As facial recognition software evolves, people will evolve defensive strategies (poker face? false-emotion face? alien-face?).
Another thought, I'm reminded of a phrase from Snowcrash -- "condense facts from the vapors of nua
Automating Go (Score:4, Interesting)
"Two Hungarian scientists have now come up with an algorithm that helps computers pick the right move in Go, played by millions around the world, in which players must capture spaces by placing black and white marbles on a board in turn.
"On a nine by nine board we are not far from reaching the level of a professional Go player," said Levente Kocsis at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' computing lab SZTAKI.
The 19 by 19 board which top players use is still hard for a machine, but the new method is promising because it makes better use of the growing power of computers than earlier Go software."
Link [reuters.com]
See also:
http://zaphod.aml.sztaki.hu/papers/ecml06.pdf [sztaki.hu]
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/vanderwerf03solving.h
http://www.primidi.com/2007/02/26.html [primidi.com]
-kgj
3D face scans? (Score:2)
It seems to me comparing this to human face recognition capabilities is like comparing apples to oranges. Humans recognize faces with vision (3D and 2D) and can work with huge amounts of noise.
These systems appear to require a still head in a vise, a huge amount of spatial data, are not vision based and I'm guessing are not very immune to noise.
To answer the other posts - I don't think you'll see this any time soon because it doesn't seem to be practical for most uses
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Caricatures (Score:4, Interesting)
Other Race Effect (Score:3, Interesting)
Computers won't be subject to this.
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My Chinese mom thinks all white people look the same. I (now jokingly) tell her all Chinese look the same and she says "oh, no no no, they're not..."
One of my best friends has been working in various parts of Africa for the past few years, says it took her some time before she was able to truly tell one black person from the other, the way she can tell one white person from the other.
I'm sure lots of other people
Time to invest (Score:2, Insightful)
Face recognition indeed. (Score:2, Funny)
These face recognition programs are fantastic!
http://photos-489.ak.facebook.com/photos-ak-sf2p/v 74/6/57/529971421/n529971421_97489_2572.jpg/ [facebook.com]
Measure Attractiveness? (Score:2)
If the facial recognition software could identify the distinctive features of women that I prefer, it could potentially find chicks for me!
Of course, since this is slashdot, I would have to move out of my parents home to actually meet these hypothetical chicks.
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Surely all you have to do if you don't want to be recognised is put some putty on your chin and around the top of your cheekbones.