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?"

Comments

I've heard this for years

[2.7182]

After working in computer vision for 5 years I've realized that most problems aren't hard - they are not well defined. Mathematically face recognition is not a problem that can be stated.

Many other problems in CV are like this - edge detection, segmentation, etc. But people write hacks that work in restricted conditions and say they've solved.

And look, you could always just put on those Groucho Marx glasses.

Re:I've heard this for years

[PieSquared]

I think the real problem is what it looks at. The shape of your face is what it looks at. What if you put a little clay or really thick makeup around your jaw and cheek bones to change your visible facial structure... and of course facial hair can be shaped to look like pretty much anything is under it without even adding anything artificial to your face. And of course, you'll need multiple frames of reference with a wide angle between them to get any useful information anyway... you can't really judge depth from a single frame and if you try a little eyeshadow will throw it off. I can only see facial recognition as proving that you aren't someone smaller then you are, not that you are a specific person. And of course you could always get one of those masks from mission impossible! Yea, that's what I thought!

re: hacks and restricted conditions

[King_TJ]

But don't we almost always get a computer to solve a problem that's not strictly a mathematical one using "hacks that only work in restricted conditions"?

Our spell-checkers in our word processors don't actually know anything about the rules of a language, phonics, etc. They just do lookups from a dictionary. If a word's not listed, it has no idea if it's spelled properly or not -- even if the misspelling is one that's simply not a possible correct sequence of letters for the language. Most don't even realize if a word is misspelled in the context of the sentence, as long as it matches a correct spelling in the word list.

Until we figure out how the human brain recognizes faces as individuals, we can't expect anything *but* a clever hack for a computer to do the same. And truthfully, I suspect the human brain takes many things into account to do a "recognition" on a person. How often do you see somebody in the store that you're pretty sure you know from a previous job, school, etc. but you're not quite sure? I've had this happen a few times, and to make a better determination, I had to take other factors into account, like the sound of their voice if I heard them speak, the way they walked, or maybe an expression that came across their face. Humans "key in" on specific things that help them remember a person. And depending on which "features" they chose, they may or may not be effective. (Say you remember a gal really well because of her long, flowing hair? If she cuts it real short, there's a good chance you won't recognize her at all anymore if she walks by you.)