Google mulls over facial recognition

Facial recognition technology is something that might be employed by law enforcement agencies (at least that’s what we see in the movies, where the covert operations team has this high tech software that is capable of enhancing even the most grainy and blurry photo to excruciatingly high detail, running it against an international database of people based on facial recognition in mere seconds) to track down the baddies when cracking a case, but what happens when you put it into the hands of an Internet search Giant like Google? Google executive Eric Schmidt mentioned that the even he was surprised by the accuracy level of new facial recognition technology, but it was “unlikely” that Google would work on a database that is able to recognize people’s faces – without ruling out the possibility of some other company crossing that line instead. 

Ironically, a couple of patent applications at the very least (with one going public) showed that Google themselves might just cross that line, where an engineering team have filed patent applications for facial recognition technology on behalf of Google Inc. The first among the two would be meant for a “Facial Recognition with Social Networking Aiding”, while the other is a more ambiguously titled “Automatically Mining Person Models of Celebrities for Visual Search Applications “.

Do you think Google is marching towards a facial recognition app? There might just be more than meets the eye in the next Google Goggles app, aye?

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers
Tags: facial recognition, Google