

Google Acquires Facial Recognition Technology Company - d0ne
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/07/22/google-acquires-facial-recognition-technology-company/?mod=google_news_blog

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forgotusername
This is the second such purchase since 2006, when they picked up Neven Vision.
Then just as now, it gives me the creeps that any company of this size and
technical capability would start hoovering up companies specializing in facial
recognition. Planetary scale biometrics, anyone?

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jonknee
Google uses facial recognition to automatically blur out faces in Street View.
I imagine they have some fun ideas concerning Android as well.

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shantanubala
Street View is just face detection (ie figure out where the faces are), and
that technology has been around for years (it's even in bundled with the open
source OpenCV library). This company does face recognition, which is the
identification of individual people based on an image -- it's a very
complicated problem.

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sylvinus
According to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Google>
this is the 100th acquisition by Google!

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flat
imagine being able to search for faces in images and videos on the internet as
easily as we can search for words in documents.

it would be amusing to find oneself in various peripheral crow footage /
holiday photos. it might also have an effect on the porn industry. any other
consequences?

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jwuphysics
Congrats to PittPatt! I work for one of their competitors, also from CMU.

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apu
Congrats to the PittPatt people on HN (I know there are one or two here)!

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DjMojoRisin
Go CMU!

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zackattack
I've been tracking this company for a while. I wonder when they will acquire
some Paul Ekman products.

