Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Analyzing (All of) Star Trek With Face Recognition

Posted by kdawson on from the sees-you-when-you're-sleeping dept.

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.

7 of 140 comments (clear)

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

    know the name of that red shirted guy?

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

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

    2. 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. 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.
  3. 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!

  4. 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!