Who will be the first one to come out with an iPhone app that allows you to take a picture of someone and then automagically find the persons name using facial recognition?<p>It really seems like a pretty simple idea, especially with an API, which is already attached to Facebook, that does all of the work for you.<p>The API seems a bit limiting, though. For example, you must specify a list of possible users "you're looking for" in order it to find a match. The only way around this seems to be creating a private namespace that includes your own index of all Facebook users, etc.
I've been waiting for this to happen for a while and I'm both excited and scared.<p>No longer are photos anonymous just because they are in a place that doesn't have you name attached. This is just the beginning of this technology.
Similar API's are available all over the web. the best seems to be www.pittpatt.com but it's kinda pricey. A big advantage is that PittPatt can be installed locally on a server to provide a secure app. Privacy could be a concern as the images are stored on a CDN.<p>A big question is what is the confidence score of accurately matching images? The smaller the dataset the better but this was a big concern with the app that i was building. General uses like celebrity sites wont have this concern.
one thing that makes me a bit nervous about this is how frequently it's wrong on its finer points. if you look at the attributes of the tagged people you'll see they are wrong about 50% of the time (for instance a smiling male is auto tagged as a non-smiling female). this makes me nervous because we are in a place now where the layman takes the absolute, digitally measured attribute as fact (ie: this is a woman, this person is smiling), instead of using their own facilities.<p>it's a minor thing, with this example, i know, but how long before the precision of our digital measurement ends up hurting us because the layman doesn't understand its inaccuracy?<p>edit: this isn't a critique of face.com, but those who may end up using it. face.com = awesome tech, very cool.
Wow. The algo is really awesome. I detected every single face here: <a href="http://chir.ag/gallery/md/nature-coast-kayaking/047.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://chir.ag/gallery/md/nature-coast-kayaking/047.jpg</a> and got smile + glasses right for everyone except one. Nice domain too.
Does anyone know how mature algorithms that use video for facial recognition are? It seems one could use multiple consecutive frames to draw better inferences about 3D geometry, and perhaps resolve various occlusions.