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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
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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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!
So now they can link my face to my e-mail address? No thanks.
"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."
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.
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?
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...
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I don't have full-blown face blindness, but I'm not terribly far away.
If two people look vaguely similar, I have tremendous difficulty telling them apart. I don't mean "they could be twins" similar either -- even "they could be second cousins" can seriously throw me off. I can meet a person, spend twenty minutes talking to that person, walk away and come back, and be completely unable to pick that person out of a small crowd. Depending upon how "average" the person's face was, I might not even experience any sense of familiarity at all when looking at them.
You learn other tricks for recognizing people after a while. I usually note what people are wearing, so that if I run into them again the same day I have a good shot at recognizing them. Hair color and style help a lot, and tend to remain constant for a substantial time. I'm also very good at identifying voices, so I often wait to hear a person speak before I feel confident that I have correctly identified them. I also rely on my wife to help me remember people a lot -- fortunately she's healthy in this regard, and very understanding of the difficulty I have.
To give you an idea of how bad things are, a long time ago I was away on business for two months. My girlfriend (now my wife) and I had been together for two years at that point, but I hadn't seen her during those two months.
She had changed her hairstyle while I was away, so when I got off the plane I didn't recognize her. I noticed this girl smiling at me, and I thought she looked sort of like my girlfriend, but it wasn't until I was within five feet of her that I was sure it was her.
Can you imagine dating a girl for two years, and then having trouble recognizing her after a mere two-month absence? And I don't have face blindness. I just have moderate difficulty identifying people, compared to the full-blown disorder.
So, yes, call it a "culture of euphamism" all you like, but I certainly believe that this is a real disability that affects real people.
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