
Unknown Civil War Faces are Being Identified Through Facial Recognition App - arto
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/12/01/civil-war-photo-sleuth/
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mosselman
This is a very cool use of facial recognition. It could also be expanded to
the complete history of photographs. So lets say trying to identify all people
on all historical photographs. Wouldn't it be funny to see some of the same
people pop up in different pictures around the world in events that were
previously thought unrelated?

For privacy issues you'd want to limit this to periods in time that are far
back enough for most people to have passed though. So I could imagine the
Second World War to be a (somewhat arbitrary) limit for now.

This limit would eventually need to be expanded, because I wouldn't want my
photographs to be examined like this in 70 years time.

~~~
jnty
Given the likelihood of coincidences like that actually happening, you'd
surely end up finding lots and lots of pairs of completely unrelated people
that look remarkably similar, with no way of knowing if any of them are
actually the same person.

~~~
glaslong
A surprise benefit may be finding out which members of the human race are
actually immortal and have been hiding it from the rest of society. /s

[https://www.popdust.com/conspiracy-theory-thursday-keanu-
ree...](https://www.popdust.com/conspiracy-theory-thursday-keanu-reeves-is-
immortal-1892051564.html)

~~~
wanderfowl
I've always found it slightly amusing that we've now reached the time in the
history of civilization where immortality, even were it possible, has become a
_massive_ liability. One can no longer simply assume a new identity of proper
age, and attempting to do so is liable to get you jailed, or worse still, in
some shady government lab.

It's even getting to be the case now that you can't just move to a new country
and start over. Unless you've got skilled forgers close at hand, you're going
to have a bad time immediately, and with facial recognition and biometrics,
you'll have a worse time still.

It's perhaps the definition of a low-probability corner case, but if any
alchemists happened to succeed, they're no doubt having a pretty depressing
century.

~~~
Cpoll
I think if you've lived a few centuries, you might've picked up the skills,
experience and connections required to make it work. There are already plenty
of regular people living with false identities, so you wouldn't stick out like
a sore thumb. Plastic surgery solves the rest.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _I think if you 've lived a few centuries, you might've picked up the
> skills, experience and connections required to make it work._

This is how the immortals from Ilaria Corporation handled it in Helix. The
show was promising, it's really sad it quickly went from interesting to crazy
to utter gross.

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kartan
I always though that this was gonna happen in the future. That someone 100
years from now will check zettabytes of videos, pictures, posts and is going
to create complete profiles of everyone that has lived in our time.

Each time that you are in the background of a picture of an stranger. In the
broad panoramic videos from sport stadiums. From fingerprinting you writing in
all social media. From government documentation. From text of other people
talking about you... all your digital traces to know who were you.

Now is happening with past pictures, even that there is no so much to mine
compared with the present.

~~~
blazespin
Yes, I can imagine with video they'll be able to do 3d reconstruction and even
more accurate.

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roadkillon101
Well here's the actual link to the website
[https://www.civilwarphotosleuth.com/](https://www.civilwarphotosleuth.com/)
What I'm curious about is what image recognition system they used to map the
faces in the picture?

~~~
gwern
I thought it would be dlib since that's open-source and very easy to use, but
it's actually the Microsoft face recognition API, according to their paper:
"Photo Sleuth: Combining Collective Intelligence and Computer Vision to
Identify Historical Portrait", Mohanty et al 2018
[http://crowd.cs.vt.edu/wordpress/wp-
content/uploads/2018/04/...](http://crowd.cs.vt.edu/wordpress/wp-
content/uploads/2018/04/Mohanty_Photo_Sleuth_CI_2018.pdf)

~~~
geephroh
For anyone who wants to mess around with Face API, MS has a simple python
implementation along with a sample desktop app here:

[https://github.com/Microsoft/Cognitive-Face-
Python](https://github.com/Microsoft/Cognitive-Face-Python)

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fencepost
The pictures that jumped to mind for this as a potential social issue aren't
the Civil War ones - they're the Jim Crow era lynch mob pictures.

I'd say there's a huge difference between knowing that your (or someone
else's) ancestors were terribly racist and knowing that they were involved in
murders.

~~~
orblivion
How about your living relatives? This wasn't so long ago.

~~~
fencepost
Based on numbers from
[http://law2.umkc.edu/Faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynching...](http://law2.umkc.edu/Faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingyear.html)
lynchings dropped off pretty rapidly after 1922, and were in the single digits
annually by the mid 1930s. I suspect that there's also a drop in pictures of
crowds and a social change that made them considered if not wrong at least
"not something that people like US do."

There are very few people still alive who were adults when there were large
numbers of lynchings happening in the US.

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lostapathy
CIA invents this tech. Now it can be used to detect where they have meddled in
the past. CIA buries this tech.

