Slashdot Mirror
Face Recognition - Real or Science Fiction?
An anonymous reader writes "Facial recognition software has been touted as one of the technologies that will change our future, particularly in law enforcement. How close are we to being recognized by a computer anywhere we go, as portrayed in movies like Minority Report? According to the industry's recent Public Relations releases, these products are closer than we think.
The reality though, is that current products work only when utilizing a small comparative sample, and any attempts for an individual to disguise themselves typically throw off the results. To see how far this technology needs to go before becoming mainstream, one site utilized Government-tested face recognition software, available freely through MyHeritage.com, to compare hundreds of famous people, animals, and cartoons to a database of 2,000 celebrities. Some of the results showed promise for the technology, but most were just funny — for example, who would mistake Barbara Streisand for Shrek, or Lance Bass of N'Sync for a Teletubby?"
I thought they used chips in the eyes of people in minority report, not face recognition.
I've tried out the software and it was fun for some laughs. I'm not sure how it works exactly but I can tell that the angle of the face makes a difference. When I put one picture of myself in where I'm looking ever so slightly to the right, I'm matched with celebrities photos looking in that direction. When I put in a similar photo facing the other direction, I get a different set of celebrities looking in the other direction. There's a few overlaps and those are the ones I think I look the most like (although it's a stretch to say I have anything that could pass as a celebrity look).
"How close are we to being recognized by a computer anywhere we go, as portrayed in movies like Minority Report?"
Now I could be wrong but I am pretty sure Minority report was portraying retinal scanning not facial recognition
Brain hacks seem to be fundamentally different than computer hacks. Or, the brain seems to have a collection of hacks that we have almost no understanding of, in addition to the hacks that we do understand.
Ever since the advent of solid state electronics, it was said to be only a matter of time before robots would be sweeping, washing dishes, performing surgery, etc.
Things that we think are really simple, that even retarded people can do, like recognize a face or a voice, understand speech, move bipedally with grace (hell, with any number of legs -- 2, 4 or 6), pour a glass of water, etc. are *hard* for robots and AI. We don't even have a model for how these things work. Even really dumb animals like turkeys can run through their environments and successfully hunt and catch flying insects.
We do have robots that are getting good with articulation, like Asimo, but we still aren't sure whether they are using the same 'tricks' that organisms use. That is to say, they are a solution to the problem of bipedal motion, but we don't know if they are the same solution that the human mind is. I'm not sure that we have even a model of what solutions organisms use.
Meanwhile, things that we think are difficult, like playing chess, factoring polynomials, or other kinds of difficult math, are easy for a computer. Now we know that the brain can do complex math like trigonometry, in order to accomplish tasks like catching a ball. but that doesn't help the average person play chess or do complex math on paper. However, the average person excels at these hard AI problems, like having a conversation or pouring a glass of water.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso