The term facial recognition implies that the technology has to look at your face in order to discern who you are, but that’s no longer the case with Facebook’s facial recognition technology, an iteration of which is already live on the world’s largest social network allowing users to tag themselves or their friends automatically in photos. Facebook’s head of artificial intelligence has said that the company’s facial recognition technology is so advanced now that it doesn’t even need to look at your face in order to recognize you.
This means that the technology is capable of recognizing the person in the picture based on other clues, this eliminates the need for the software to actually have a look at the face.
Yann LeCun led Facebook’s team at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Boston where the technology was demonstrated. Instead of the face it looks like other clues such as clothing, pose, hair and posture. “There are a lot of cues we use. People have characteristic aspects, even if you look at them from the back,” LeCun said.
This particular algorithm is currently in experimental stages but even so it was able to correctly recognize people 86 percent of the time when tested against 40,000 Flickr images.
Facebook has not yet said if this technology is going to make it to the social network, but I personally wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up doing so.
Filed in . Read more about Facebook and Facial Recognition. Source: newscientist