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Face Recognition Algorithm Finally Outperforms Humans
KentuckyFC (1144503) writes "Face recognition has come a long way in recent years. In ideal lighting conditions, given the same pose, facial expression etc, it easily outperforms humans. But the real world isn't like that. People grow beards, wear make up and glasses, make strange faces and so on, which makes the task of facial recognition tricky even for humans. A well-known photo database called Labelled Faces in the Wild captures much of this variation. It consists of 13,000 face images of almost 6000 public figures collected off the web. When images of the same person are paired, humans can correctly spot matches and mismatches 97.53 per cent of the time. By comparison, face recognition algorithms have never come close to this. Now a group of computer scientists have developed a new algorithm called GaussianFace that outperforms humans in this task for the first time. The algorithm normalises each face into a 150 x 120 pixel image by transforming it based on five image landmarks: the position of both eyes, the nose and the two corners of the mouth. After being trained on a wide variety of images in advance, it can then compare faces looking for similarities. It does this with an accuracy of 98.52 per cent; the first time an algorithm has beaten human-level performance in such challenging real-world conditions. You can test yourself on some of the image pairs on the other side of the link."
Of all the singularity-ish technological advances I could be alive for, it had to be this one :-(
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Let's see if it recognize me with my Groucho Marx glasses. Can authorities relate me as being a Marxist for that?
I'm sure a computer is better at recognizing people that people don't know. That is taking in a database of 10,000 photos and matching them against a population set of 20,000,000. A human being really can't do that. However, face recognition of known faces? I really doubt the computer can beat us.
Now, you might say the computer has an advantage in that it can look at facial statistics and match faces even after plastic surgery but that's just because those alteration technics are designed to work against human beings.
If the primary threat is a computer recognizing you then you can alter your appearance in other ways to trick the machine. And those are technics that are unlikely to be as effective against a person.
Furthermore, using such methods is unlikely to be as taboo in human company as doing something that fools humans.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
But Human's don't match faces based on the entire population either. Just on the faces they know.
I don't know how many people the average person can recognise, but my guess is that it will be less than 13,000.
This anthropologist seems to have worked in this area, and he puts the number of people you can recognise and put a name to as 1500. (You'll recognise more than that, but you won't have names to go with them.)
http://spectrum.ieee.org/telec...
I was hoping the link would include an actual self-administered test, with your score reported at the end.
I looked through the "same" pairs a bit. It confirmed that I'm terrible with unfamiliar faces -- on perhaps a third to a half of the pairs, I would've had no idea that both represented the same person. For faces that I've seen hundreds or thousands of times -- Condi Rice, Rumsfeld, Bono, Jimmy Carter -- I guess I do as well as anyone.
For the "different" pairs, I only looked through the first dozen or so, and they all seemed obviously different to me. Also not surprising; I get lots of false negatives (failing to recognize a face), but few false positives (thinking I recognized someone when I really didn't).
I wonder how my life would've turned out differently if I'd grown up with a prosthesis to help me recognize faces. I wonder how much difference it would make if I got one today. I feel like I've come up with reasonable coping strategies, but I wonder...
Exactly the same technology would be very useful for salesmen.
Both the title and description are sensationalism. If you read the paper, the algorithm works at 98.52 on 1 of 5 data sets. We could also accurately say the algorithm is only 89.33% accurate. The score from the most difficult database. Much worse than the normal person.
That being said, it is much better than other publicly available algorithms.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
The other stunning form of Lord Shiva is His half-female version . If you could manage this form, you would discombobulate not just Gaussian Face but also fellow humans too.
Extending the theory, painting random noses, lips, eyes and other features on cheeks, foreheads etc would defeat these automatic face recognition systems.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
and/or sensationalism... a 13000 image set a whole population does not make. It's probably just better than the existing algorithms somewhat.
I doubt my internal facial recognition distinguishes between 13000 people. And worse, as damning as it sounds, it really starts to fail when dealing with people of certain races that i just didn't get much exposure to as a kid.