

Face.com opens facial recognition API to developers - slapshot
http://developers.face.com/

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barlo
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?

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.

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.

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icey
I've implemented something like this before. I ran into a lot of performance
issues though. A match against a known person seems quite fast, but when you
multiply this against even a medium sized network of people the speed becomes
problematic.

This was in the 90s though, I'm sure it's much faster now - I just dont know
if it's fast enough to be useful.

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ComputerGuru
Hey, they do it all the time on CSI and in real-time - get with the program,
man!

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tibbon
I've been waiting for this to happen for a while and I'm both excited and
scared.

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.

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viraptor
Suddenly blocking out faces on google steet view makes even more sense than
before. I wonder if we ever get to the situation where there's a law
requirement to remove faces from crowd photos in newspapers / passer-bys
behind street interviews.

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wdewind
no reasonable expectation of privacy, not gon happen

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viraptor
Are you implying that there was a reasonable expectation of privacy in google
steet view case?

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jrockway
Google did it to be nice, not because they were legally required to.

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jamesshamenski
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.

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.

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DennisP
Interesting. How pricey?

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wdewind
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.

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?

edit: this isn't a critique of face.com, but those who may end up using it.
face.com = awesome tech, very cool.

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viraptor
The demo page gives a lot of fun and space for experimenting... It seems
popular fastfood mascots don't get recognised properly either re. sex and
smiling (even though 2 of them have beards!) (tried these links:
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/bf/KFC_logo...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/bf/KFC_logo.svg/160px-
KFC_logo.svg.png,http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/46/Ronald_McDonald.jpg,http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6f/Creepy_King_Bed.png))

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wdewind
yes, although i was testing their own demo pictures.

for those who downvoted: its pretty dangerous to take something that is
traditionally done by humans or in an analog fashion and do it digitally when
you are wrong around 50% of the time because people tend to trust technical
things that look "safe enough." i understand the tech will get better, but i
think its pretty bad to have attributes like "smiling?" and "male/female" even
present in the API at all if i can flip a coin blindly and have roughly the
same outcome.

of course its complicated, technically impressive regardless. but when a
consumer sees "facial recognition technology" from the tech community they
aren't about to question it. all im saying is if you are going to offer that
kind of analysis, it should be right before people can start using it in their
apps via an API and end consumers start depending on the data. if it's not
accurate, or not a big enough a deal to care about, it shouldn't be in the
API.

here come more down votes...sigh

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milkshakes
Anyone know where to find a "developer code" to sign up?

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showerst
Trying filling in everything else and leaving that field blank.

I tried a few different combos and that's that one that I think worked.

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skorgu
Yep. No asterisk next to the "developer code" box so it's not actually
required.

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chime
Wow. The algo is really awesome. I detected every single face here:
<http://chir.ag/gallery/md/nature-coast-kayaking/047.jpg> and got smile +
glasses right for everyone except one. Nice domain too.

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Aron
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.

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mufumbo
uow, this is really good! Finally i can throw all my crappy opencv
integrations with java :)

