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Analyzing (All of) Star Trek With Face Recognition
An anonymous reader writes "Accurate face recognition is coming. Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, a face recognition start-up spun out from Carnegie Mellon University, has posted a tech demo showing an analysis of the entire original Star Trek series using face recognition. The online visualization includes various annotated clips of the series with clickable thumbnails of each character's appearance. They also have a separate page showing the full data of all the prominent characters in every episode including extracting thumbnails of each appearance." Their software can recognize frontal or near-frontal face instances.
About a year or two ago
What I wanted was for face recognition software to become more general so you could search for movies using vague memories from your childhood:
"Girl on boat", "Wheat field", "Yellow flag"
With an advanced enough search engine, you could tag everything automatically.
I didn't think of privacy concerns though, I guess thats a good point.
Are you serious? Not only is it a fantastic demonstration of face recognition technology under real world conditions, but it's also incredibly useful.. if you have a little vision. How many times have you been watching a tv show and said "wow, where have I seen that guy before?" To find out these days I typically do:
1. Take note of the show I'm watching and the episode name (if given).
2. Go to imdb and hope they have specific info on that specific episode.
3. Try to guess what the character's name was, and take note of the actor's name.
4. Click through to the actor's filmography.
And, most typically, one of those steps fails. Now imagine if your tivo or other media playing device had face recognition technology like this. You'd just press one button and it would put boxes around all the faces on-screen, you'd select the face you're interested in and it would immediately tell you the name of the actor, the name of the character that actor is playing in this episode, how many other episodes of this series that he's in, and the actor's entire filmography. That's a real product that I'd actually buy!
How we know is more important than what we know.
If you let it play a few minutes you'll see it indenify Spock and then in the next scene he comes up as unknown even though he's facing the camera. The system seems to fail when he arches his eyebrows.
I am not sure how much I really trust that per-episode chart once I started looking at one of the sample episodes. At some points the face recognition will not pick up on main characters for apparently no reason. For example, in episode 53 at about 1:30 in the sample there is dialog between Spock, Kirk, and someone else. The camera angles are steady and consistent (other than people turning their head while talking) and sometimes the system does not recognize one of the characters after it did just a few seconds earlier. On the right side it shows the name of the character or "Other" if it recognizes a face, but not compared to something it knows about.
Overall, this is simply amazing!
"Mostly harmless."
Most of us have seen the pictures of children who have gone missing. These pictures appear at Walmart, in the 1040 publication from the IRS, etc. Many such pictures contain the faces that have been advanced in age by computer software.
However, the reach of such pictures is limited. Few people pay attention to such pictures. Of the people who care enough to notice, they are not constantly looking for the missing children in order to report them to the police.
How can this new face-recognition software help? Most restaurants (like McDonalds), most movie theatres, and the like already have cameras that film everyone entering and leaving the premises. The government should feed these image streams into a cluster of supercomputers owned by the FBI and running this new face-recognition software. It will then match faces (in the crowds) against the age-advanced images of the missing children. Such a supercomputers could run 24 hours for 7 days per week and scan images that are fed from millions of locations across the USA.
In such a scenario, the chances of finding the missing children would be greatly improved.
If you don't want to be recognized by facial recognition software, wear black and white greasepaint. In Episode 70 the actors playing Lokai and Bele are misidentified in a few scenes. The images are categorized by the black and white makeup rather than the actor. I'm not sure why Bele's face paint is reversed in some of the images. Did he look in a mirror or something, or did the video capture reverse it?