

Show HN: Our new online face recognition demo - lbrandy
http://webdemo.pittpatt.com/recognition_demo/

======
ktharavaad
Very good demo and it also happens to be related to my interests so here's my
little analysis.

1, The face detection of this program is more impressive than the face
recognition.

2, The detector is able to detect across variaty of poses and come up with a
an estimate for the pose of the face. It does a lot more than the best
opensource detector (openCV) out there.

3, If you download the mac program and open up the package contents, you will
see that under the data file directory, it uses a different set of files
(features.bin, log_likelihood.bin) for frontal and profile view detection.

4, If you look at the company's CEO's background and publications here:

[http://www.ri.cmu.edu/person.html?type=publications&pers...](http://www.ri.cmu.edu/person.html?type=publications&person_id=270)

It would suggest that the detector is using a histogram-based detector as
outlined in his paper. The other detector made by CMU is the Rowley-Kanade one
but I don't think that one is fast enough to run in realtime.

Shamelsss plug, I implemented a javascript face detector ( with source code )
here: <http://blog.kpicturebooth.com/?p=8> , it only handles frontal non-
rotated faces =P

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lbrandy
I have a few comments for you guys about our demo:

1\. Image to Image is a bit misleading because we are fairly strict in our
online demo in pose requirements, so many faces are "non-suitable" because
they aren't frontal.

2\. It works much better for video settings (but that type of online demo is
way too CPU intensive) because we can organize each person into continuous
tracks and we only need them to become 'frontal' once to do matching. And the
more they are frontal, the more data points we have.

Here's an example of recognition applied to video:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsjf3IDXef8>

~~~
10ren
Impressive. What's the implementation language? I assume C.

~~~
rlm
Why do you assume that? It could just as well be MatLab or something similar,
that makes fiddling with multimedia very easy.

~~~
10ren
Performance

~~~
rlm
MatLab-performance can be quite good :-)

~~~
10ren
OK, I'm not familiar with MatLab performance. :-) But image processing is very
computationally expensive, and the demo here is unbelievably fast. It must be
optimized for its specific tasks. You just can't get that from a general
package.

In retrospect, it's not surprising that they're optimizing some parts with
assembler - even SSE (Streaming SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data)
Extensions <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_SIMD_Extensions>), which I
hadn't heard of, but which is the kind of vector parallelism that gives
supercomputers their speed.

------
10ren
Michael Jackson vs. Jackson 5

[http://webdemo.pittpatt.com/recognition_demo/view.php?id=N56...](http://webdemo.pittpatt.com/recognition_demo/view.php?id=N56RE2RST3297)

It needs a threshold of -3 to detect it, but it gets the right face (I think).

------
markessien
So...how exactly does one go about getting a-hold of this technology? There is
no download link and it's not clear if the contact link will result in my
being sent a demo.

------
spydez
My first R&D project at my company when I just got out of college was in image
recognition, so this is pretty interesting.

Here's 2 I did:

[http://webdemo.pittpatt.com/recognition_demo/view.php?id=JKW...](http://webdemo.pittpatt.com/recognition_demo/view.php?id=JKWNVKFUCF167)

[http://webdemo.pittpatt.com/recognition_demo/view.php?id=Q9J...](http://webdemo.pittpatt.com/recognition_demo/view.php?id=Q9JA7ZVNZW158)

The second one pretty impressive, even if it's under the default 0.00
threshold. I mean, RMS's mouth is obscured behind a katana and it still got a
-0.14.

You need to work on the PG recognition though. It doesn't seem to want to
recognize two photos as being both him. :P

~~~
lutorm
Funny, my first test was also a pic of RMS.

------
dbul
CMU has been working on facial recognition for a long time. VASC and the now
defunct MAPS lab did quite a bit of research for recognizing objects in
general as well as facial features. It is good to see a spinoff company that
can make money from the hard work put into it. More info:

[http://www.ri.cmu.edu/research_project_detail.html?project_i...](http://www.ri.cmu.edu/research_project_detail.html?project_id=621&menu_id=262)

------
markessien
I totally misunderstood what this is. You recognize and match two faces across
two pictures! I thought you just identify that a face is there. You REALLY
need to explain a bit clearer what it is - for you it's obvious, for a random
person clicking through, it's not obvious at all. The Michael Jackson picture
would be the best sample of this.

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allenbrunson
who else thought of this?

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uco5Ed-5y2U>

(synopsis: ancient mr. show sketch involving a corporate mascot called pit-
pat. warning: swearing)

~~~
brett
It was certainly the first thing that came to mind for me. After seeing the
URL, I was pretty disappointed not to find a magical nonthreatening pansexual
spokesthing on the actual page.

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dkokelley
_Sorry, we are experiencing a large volume of submissions. There are 1 images
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cool-RR
How is this better than what Facebook uses?

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spoiledtechie
Looks like something to give the government to track your EVERY MOVE.

Good job tho guys. Its pretty impressive.

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vaksel
Seems to work, good job.

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thepanister
This is amazing... although it needs some additional work( no ideas in my head
for now).

Did you use your own algorithm for it?

