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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.

13 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. anyone by ionix5891 · · Score: 5, Funny

    know the name of that red shirted guy?

    1. Re:anyone by LargeMythicalReptile · · Score: 4, Funny

      You mean Ensign Ricky?

    2. Re:anyone by prefec2 · · Score: 5, Funny

      It is either Ensign Expendable or Lieutenant Cannonfodder. But I'm not quite sure.

    3. Re:anyone by RazzleDazzle · · Score: 5, Funny

      I'm not even supposed to be here. I'm just "Crewman Number Six." I'm expendable. I'm the guy in the episode who dies to prove how serious the situation is. I've gotta get outta here.

      --
      ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)
  2. I thought of something similar by whois · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:ok ... by QuantumG · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  4. Re:ok ... by LordKaT · · Score: 4, Funny

    Jesus, that's a lot of work to go through to figure out that Bruce Campbell has been in a shitload of B-movies.

  5. Doesn't work well by genner · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Doesn't work well by Burdell · · Score: 5, Funny

      The system seems to fail when he arches his eyebrows.

      Fascinating!

    2. Re:Doesn't work well by karnal · · Score: 4, Funny

      defiantly quite impressive.

      I had to read that twice to fully understand that you may have meant "definitely." Or perhaps, you do think it's defiantly quite impressive. God, that's even hard to type.

      --
      Karnal
  6. Re:It's not so bad... by bughunter · · Score: 5, Funny

    I imagine this scene would cause a few problems for the software, too.

    --
    I can see the fnords!
  7. Re:Seven of Nine! by Tubal-Cain · · Score: 4, Informative

    (3) probably most important: out of copyright.

    Really?

  8. Re:YRO? by William+Baric · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Could you post the journal of all the things you did in public places today? I'm interest to know. Begin by telling me all the address of all the houses and buildings you entered. I mean... you can't expect privacy as soon as you leave your door, right? So I'm sure you won't mind if I know, right?

    BTW, Slashdot is certainly a public place and so hiding behind a nickname should not be expected. Could you give us your real name please?