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Eigenfaces Online Service
nordicfrost writes "At Norways largest online newspaper, they're doing the beta test of an Eigenface service. In short, it takes a portrait picture, treats it with some filters and analyzes the vectors in it. This is used for crimestopping and generic Big Brother activities. In this database, however, your mug is compared with celebrites to find which one that matches you the most. I match, among others, Brad Garrett. This site is pretty self-explaining, upload a portrait pic of yourself taken right in front of your face, closely cropped to the face and use the up arrow to see your top ten list of celebrity matches. You have to agree to some terms first, like giving permission to use your pic in promotions and other stuff and not to upload indecent stuff."
Wasn't there something like this in Virtual Light? I think it was used to find missing persons by posting information on which celebrities the abducted/missing person looked like.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
A facial recognition system like EigenFace looks for the dominant modes of variation among a population of faces to find predictors that help distinguish among the different faces. By ignore the ways that faces are more similar and accentuating the ways that faces are most different, they can craft identification algorithms. The only challenge is getting enough data to understand the full range of facial variations -- hence this solicitation for more facial data.
But I wonder if people can game this system to make themselves unrecognizable. For example, a member of the tin-foil hat brigade might submit multiple mugshots of themselves under mutliple assumed identities. By using slight variations in facial expression, makeup, lighting, and camera angle they would make the system think that a large fraction of the population "looks like" the person who seeks anonymity. The system would then have a hard time identifying the tin-foil hat wearer because he/she matches so many people in the test data.
Anyone can make themselves "look average" if they can bias the dataset that defines the average.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I just hope they can keep this out of the hands of the police. They would LOVE to get their hands on a database like this (even with the inevitable false positives you get when people just want to prank the system with mcbride/ hello.jpg type stuff). If you think i'm being too serious about this, think of the blurred lines between the media and serious business that is already the case in some countries. Keeping in the vein of the article, spot the quote: "Now i can feel like Matt Dillon instead of an asshole."
Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
Perhaps less obvious is the usefulness of this system for syndrome diagnosis. There, we depend on our visual memory of a dysmorphic "Gestalt" to recognize human malformation syndromes. So far, attempts at some kind of computer-aided diagnosis have failed. Too bad, because syndrome diagnosis like we do it now is error-prone and difficult. This system however may be used to recognize typical "syndrome vectors", so you can feed it a patient's picture and have it say "x% match with oculo-dento-digital dysplasia" or whatever disease comes to mind. Potentially very useful!
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
Better yet, test the site out by uploading pictures of celebrities, and see which celebrity is says they most closely resemble.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.