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The Face Detector
Roland Piquepaille writes "Almost all human faces have common characteristics, such as two eyes and one mouth. Still, some people, affected by face blindness, cannot recognize one face from another one. So it's understandable that face recognition is a major challenge for computer vision systems. In "Facing facts in computer recognition,", the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that a team from Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute has developed a very accurate software to find faces within images. By analyzing only 768 pixels, the system can detect 93 percent of the faces in a set of images while falsely identifying four objects as faces. The Face Detector Demo is available online and you can submit an image for analysis and receive the results by e-mail. The technology will be used for security purposes, but also by digital photography companies who want to automatically reduce "red eye" effects. You'll find more details and references in this overview."
...to the Mars rovers.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
What I really want is one that is portable that will whisper the name of people into my ear so I never have to remember anyone's name ever again. Something with hooks into the FBI's most wanted list would be nice too (Hey you just walked by a guy who is worth 2 million if you turn him in).
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Where's Waldo? :D
instead of the endless "let's use it in airports" crap, it looks like they've found a real use for this kind of thing.
give it to blind people so they can know who they're talking to. But don't stop there - man, the number of times I've forgotten names... it'd be great if they could integrate this kind of thing into some glasses, that popped up the name of the person as you looked at them (assuming, of course, you knew them).
whoever commercialises that tech first is going to make a lot of $$$, I think...
-- james
This is old news - software that finds faces has been available for years. To cite an older example, the company Miros, which later became TrueFace - they used a neural-net approach.
Yes, yes it does. This one of the big problems with the software, is that some things look like faces and really aren't. A human can tell because we've got a lot more training on different data sets. After seeing some of the demos of this stuff, either they really jacked up the accuracy in the last few weeks, or it was under more controlled settings. Off a picture from a new york street it could only pick up about 60% of the faces and had a decent amount of false positives.
Also, for those who won't read the article, this is just about finding the faces, not recognizing them. This is a prerequisite toward ubiquitous facial recognition.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
I dont get the point ? It doesnt recognise faces, just tells you if theres one there. Thats not exactly state of the art is it ? When other companies are producing systems that can identify people from images, albeit inaccurately.
...while falsely identifying four objects as faces.
That's interesting. The AI is sufficient to identify most faces. And it sees a few faces where none exists - not unlike people. Little kids point out when their bananas, carrots and peas line up just right to make a face. If they see it, why shouldn't a computer? What about the moon? Would this software see a face there? A man maybe?
There is no point to this, just interesting thoughts that struck me while reading.
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Can it differentiate between a male face and that of a female? Besides the obvious facial hair thing, what makes the two different anyway?
I can't tell people apart sometimes. I have a VERY hard time remembering someone's name, especially when they're Person #12 I Met On The Tour Of The Office out of The 37 People I Met On My First Day.
But am I afflicted with "Face Blindness"? NO! I have a shitty memory for faces, and that's it! I don't have some made-up malady that can be cured with thousands of dollars of useless medication advertised on TV!
The technology sounds cool. The culture of euphemism in the US just pisses me off, that's all.
"Or a mouth, or a nose, or two ears. I'm the man without a face. "
So your only distinguishing feature is a large crack?
"Derp de derp."
face-blindness has a direct correlation to breast size...
Though face detection is easy for most people, some suffer a perplexing disorder called face blindness, or prosopagnosia, which is an inability to discern the differences between faces...One such sufferer, who is part of a research study by Behrmann, can't recognize his own children when he picks them up from day care. He relies on the day care workers to bring his children to him; failing that, he carries a "cheat sheet" of photographs that can help him make out who's who.
We just found a candidate for the Most Embarassing Dad of the Year Award!
Dad: Hi, I'm here to pick up my son, Billy.
Day Care Worker: Sure, which one is he?
Dad: Uhhh... (pulls out photograph) I think he's the one one the left... no wait, in the middle. I'm not really sure.
Day Care Worker: Uh, OK, sir, whatever you say. Let me just leave the room and, uh, get Billy. (leaves room, dials 9-1-1. A few minutes pass)
Kid at Daycare: Hey Billy! The cops are arresting your dad again!
If something like this were installed in airports, bus terminals, landmarks, and other public places, we could have a very effective way of stopping potential suicide bombers, terrorists or other evildoers in their tracks. What if the video camera that captured Mohammed Atta had been linked to face-recognition software that had his picture in a database? 9/11 could have been stopped right there.
I would rather put my trust in this than some rent-a-cop making minimum wage to spot suspicious people. It's been reported how unreliable eyewitness testimony is, this technology would make a much better crime fighting tool.
Slashdot Moderation: From positive to terrible in 2 "insightful" posts.
So now they can link my face to my e-mail address? No thanks.
I bet it breaks if you pass it a test image of Michael Jackson.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
"This is a prerequisite toward ubiquitous facial recognition. "
Also good for video compression. Imagine if the codecs detected where the faces in a video were and intentionally avoided compressing them to hell and gone.
"Derp de derp."
Or stored a master and rebuilt the original on height/width/orientation.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
The algorithm only recognizes where the face is. It does NOT recognize the face to match it with another picture.s ers/2236.html
The algorithm is almost scary, watch this sample
http://vasc.ri.cmu.edu/demos/faceindex/05062004/u
The problem is that even if you can recognize where this 80 pixel face is, it will be very hard to match it up against features of known people. Several [automated] face recognition systems implemented in Florida failed. In more than 3? months they failed to identify a single known offender.
Actually, that raises an important point. This system can identify a face, but does it identify only human faces? After all, chimpansees have many of the same facial characteristics as some humans.
By analyzing only 768 pixels, the system can detect 93 percent of the faces in a set of images while falsely identifying four objects as faces.
Is it - four objects in a specific set of images, or four specific objects.
for example
I don't believe I have actual face blindness, but I definitely suffer from face-recognition problems. It has been one of the defining factors of my personality, to the point that most of my friends know not to be offended if I do not recognize them until they actually speak to me. Interestingly enough, my face recognition is quite good within small time periods (1 or 2 days) but degrades quite quickly; if I haven't seen you in a week or two, then no matter how long I've known you, odds are that I won't recognize you if we meet on the street or in a small crowd of people.
This also goes along with an inability to remember faces; I can't remember at this moment what my girlfriend's face looks like, even tho I saw her a few hours ago. Hell, I can't even remember my family's faces, and I spent years around them.
Just amusing thoughts from experience..
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
Walk up to someone you never met before, greet him by name, and ask him about all the various details of his life are going that you shouldn't know because you never met him before. It'd be a good way to freak people out, especially of your borg implants aren't particular noticable...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I googled the topic and found some really amazing information. This site covers this topic greatly. I was amazed at this illness. I am no were near a great person at remembering faces but I think it's amazing that if I walked up to you and said hello, then walked away for 10 mins and came back you wouldn't recognize me. It's like Finding Nemo all over again. :)
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
Steven Pinker talks about this in his book, How the Mind Works (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997). He writes:
He also discusses a patient, LH, who was unable to recognize faces following a severe head injury, although he was in other ways entirely normal.It's important to note that this is a different question than the one the software addresses: it tries to distinguish which images are faces and which are not, not whose faces they are.
There's no way for this process to reliably determine something like race, either -- not that doing so is that desirable anyway. The characteristics that make up "an African American guy" are just not nearly as concrete as we think they are from day to day. I have a neighbor who thinks all the Somali people in my area are "Arabs." Her category is a little too broad. It seems to me like she's forcing certain expressions onto their faces, too, as part of her image of what "Arabs" are like.
People's minds love to categorize. Sometimes, a lot of the time, we force information into categories it doesn't quite fit. (Refer to: State Department intelligence from Iraqi exile organizations.) Even when the information is essentially noise, we try to sort it and sift it. As a result we persist in holding weird ideas: astrology, because the paper tells us something vague and we run the events we see past that filter.
We should expect our tools to share some of those biases and blind spots. As much as we might try to address that, we have the blind spots ourselves, so it's hard to know how to counter the problem.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
While I agree with you about the general "culture of euphemism," as you put it-- I don't think this is one of those times. Face Blindness is not referring to people like you and me who are just lousy at remembering who we met, but rather people with profound neurological disorders who *literally* cannot tell a face from something vaguely facelike, like a vase or a particular arrangement of shadows. This goes far beyond not remembering the guy you met at a convention a year ago-- but rather not even being able to tell the difference between his face and the PDA he was holding.
For a quick read on it, check out The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The things that happen to the poor people in this book as a result of disease, physical damage to the brain, or conditions they were born with are bizarre but definitely interesting.
Seriously, that's old. I'm a computer vision Ph.D. student, and there now are much faster methods. I'll just refer to my old comment.
A demo can be found here. You can contact me for more details...
Current really fast methods use cascades of very simple classifier that are very weak themselves, but very strong when combined. The work of Viola & Jones is what most of the stuff is centered around nowadays.
Do your own here:
http://argus.cs.unimaas.nl/fddemo
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The human brain is not a general-purpose computer. There are specialised modules, which evolved by natural selection, for various tasks which were evolutionarily adaptive in the ancestral environment. Which is to say, if being able to perform one type of mental processing quickly helped your hunter-gatherer ancestors survive, find fit mates and not get cheated or otherwise bested by competitors, it gradually evolved into an optimised piece of neural hardware, its template coded in their DNA. Being able to recognise faces quickly (and thus be able to match an image of someone to what you know about them and their reputation) was a major advantage in a highly social environment, and so evolved into a highly optimised module.
Sometimes, through various disorders, these modules don't work properly. Which is why conditions such as autism (dysfunction of the relating-to-other-people module), schizophrenia (inability to distinguish between internal and external stimuli), face blindness (the face-recognition module). and so on, can exist. Sure, a face-blind person can step themselves through a face-recognition algorithm, but it's slow and laborious, and by the time you're done, that cute girl/guy you're wondering whether you recognised has moved on.
I am no expert in this technology, but I am somewhat knowledgable about it, let me explain something.
You won't understand how hard is it to actually pull off something like face recognition until you yourself actually sit down and try it, only to realize that the problem is much more complex to solve when it has to be so all-encompasing.
The first step to face recognition is to recognize where the face is. The result of this process are quadrilaterals that carve out the face so that when you crop, you are left with exactly the face (frontal, or profile view or other).
A common technique used to do that is to locate the eyes. Most faces (heck, even those with veils on them for relegious reasons!) will contain eyes. Then, when detecting where the face is, you are only left with not having covered people who are wearing sunglasses (which are much easier to detect).
After you have located the eyes, you gauge by their proportions the approximate proportions of the face. Then, you apply an iterative technique (varies in principle, typically based on differential calculus combined with numerical methods of approximation) to locate the bounds of the face so you can eventually crop it to know WHERE THE FACE IS.
"Obviously", the iterative technique has to be able to detect false positives via a threshold set that will rule out the non-face. However, once you have located the eyes with certain reliability, the overall chance that you have come across a face is pretty solid.
The problem is complicated as it is already as you can see!!
Only after FINDING the face, you can start MATCHING the face. At that point you are facing a number of problems that the imagination of most /.-ers can conceive of... Bierds, smiles, teeth-showing, frowns, skin tone changes and the most popular by all scientist: plastic surgery....
A common approach to the actual face matching is a technique of the so-called eigenfaces, whereby you compute a "common" face of the pool and then you can navigate down the specialization of characteristics (e.g. bigger, bigger, bigger nostrils) as you drill down, narrowing down the pool of possible faces.
There is nothing that takes away from how much state-of-the-art CMU's research is. It would be like saying "why is someone dealing with virtual memory management of an operating system if by now, we already have user applications for the OS". Do you see the flaw in such thinking?
The science behind is a lot of mathematics, so dear parent, please don't be ignorant of this type of work just because you don't understand its complexities...
The difference, is something I've had to deal with at various jobs. Although I can after seeing a person for quite some time (several hours or meeting/talking with them 5-6 times for an hour or more) I can keep their face and name in memory, I cannot do this on a short term basis. Example. I've worked in a grocery store and a K-Mart. People will often stop you to ask where something is, and, if the item is out, you have to go check in the back for them. When people would ask me for something, and I'd have to go to the back, I'd have a problem finding them if they moved from the time I left to the time I came back. Half the time, I would be lucky enough that either the person didnt move, was waiting for me and spoke up, or was wearing some ungodly horrible color of clothing that I could instantly identify and find. The other half of the time, the person was wearing something dull and wandered off a little way and I would have no chance to recognize them unless they came back to me. Really, its a pain in the ass to be that way, as your always wondering if your going to find the right person when you get back from something. But its nothing you cant live with... I'd imagine it'd be horrible for it to get worse and not recognize family...
~~ Please keep your arms, legs, and outright stupidity inside the ride at all times. Thank You ~~
Still, some people, affected by face blindness, cannot recognize one face from another one. So it's understandable that face recognition is a major challenge for computer vision systems.
Face blindness just shows us that the specialized hardware we have for face recognition is so incredibly accurate that we rely on it completely and have no alternate methods of face recognition. When it's broken, other parts of our brain don't step in either because a) it's a hard task or b) they just don't have access to the relevant visual information. Face recognition could be totally simple, if this were our only measure.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I wonder if there are open-source/academic projects that are in relation to this. I've been testing GSPY and some other security camera software as of late. If you could do testing on this type of software and coincide with facial recog, there could be a lot of useful things that have nothin to do with homeland security and the like. (such as having a computer system activate off standby from facial recognition at a certain point). So I like science fiction... don't we all.
-- Friends don't let friends buy Nokia.
Finally! Proof that Bush is two-faced!s ers/91.html
http://vasc.ri.cmu.edu/demos/faceindex/06272001/u
Target Identified:
Name: Darl McBride
Employer: SCO
Karma: -5000
Options: Disable target, bring to penguin HQ for further questioning
Brute force: Authorized and encouraged.
Faces are moderately recognizable for me, but no more so than other objects, like rocks or cars. See this page, where someone else with this problem has a demonstration page.
Prosopagnosia is rare. Only about thirty people in the US have been formally diagnosed. I have; there's a researcher at U.C. Berkeley who ran me through the tests. There's a specific section of the brain that does face recognition, and it goes active when looking at a face. This can be detected with a functional MRI scan, which takes hours and involves looking at pictures while inside an MRI machine. For people with prosopagnosia, that doesn't happen.
It's a social handicap. It's most annoying in medium-sized groups. In big groups, you're not expected to know everyone; in small groups, cues other than faces are sufficient. It's subtle. One of the most subtle effects is that recognition takes well under a second for people who can recognize faces, but may take two or three seconds if you have to do it by other means. This breaks some implicit social cues.
Recognizing people works about equally well from the front, side, and back for me. Voice and walk are more helpful than seeing the face.
Practice doesn't help. The non-face recognition skills can be improved, but that's a workaround. Real face recognition, the kind that makes reading People magazine meaningful, is totally out of reach.
"Falling in love" doesn't work, either. Sex, yes; friendship, yes, love, no. That's tied to face recognition. As a friend of mine puts it, "there's no click".
It hasn't interfered with professional success for me; I have an advanced degree from a big-name school and I'm a multimillionaire. But it leads to a strange life.
http://vasc.ri.cmu.edu/demos/faceindex/05062004/us ers/2250.html
The worse insult in the world would be this machine matching your face up with a goatse image.
Table-ized A.I.
Once this thing works, I'll be able to Google for porn done by my favorite actresses, regardless of correct file names! YAAY!!
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
My problem remembering people's names stems from the countless hours playing video games. In video games the characters don't have feelings so it doesn't matter if you remember their name or not. So I tend not to remember their names but what they function/occuption is. So if someone tells me they are George the CEO of the company I work at. I'll remember that he's the CEO of the company but not his name.
As you upload your images to your PC, it verifies you havent taken any pictures of 'banned' individuals... Such as movie stars...
If you have, it deletes the image, and e-mails the MPAA.
Though I'm joking, there is room for such abuse once you have to be authenticated even to view your own images.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Most of the "insights" about facial recognition in the article would probably elicit a collective "well, duh, that's been known for hundreds of years" from artists (it does from me). BTW I identified all four faces correctly from the side-bar - being an artist let's you actually "see" the world rather "project" the world.
JG
I'll have that feature augmented the next time I got surgery. "Who's that?" *program initiated* "That is your ex wife, reccomend 500meter distance from target" A nice female voice tells me.