On 18 May this year, Taylor Swift’s fans could watch rehearsal clips at her concert at Los Angeles venue Rose Bowl. The clips were played at a special kiosk, but mesmerized fans had no idea that their photos were being taken by a facial recognition camera. The photos were cross-referenced with a database in Nashville, all in order to spot stalkers in case they appear at the concert.
This drone lets you fly it using facial expressions
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There are several ways to control your drone. DJI lets you do it with hand gestures and by turning your head. But robotics scientists at British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University suggest an alternative method. They are exploring the possibility of controlling the drone with a series of facial expressions. They demonstrate the technology in a paper and two videos, and it looks like a pretty interesting idea.
Take a selfie, Google will find your look-alike in a work of art
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Google’s Art & Culture app has an amusing new feature. If you take a selfie within the app, it finds your look-alike in a work of art. Google compares your face to over 70,000 artworks in their Art Project database and then tries to find your doppelgänger. Sometimes the results are stunningly accurate. But at other times they’re just hilarious.
This man used iPhone X’s face-tracking to make his face invisible
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Japanese app developer Kazuya Noshiro has recently introduced an app he’s working on. It uses iPhone X’s face-tracking feature in the creepiest and the coolest way possible: it makes his face invisible. In a short video he shared, he shows off his see-through face and the room behind him. It’s unsettling and amazing at the same time.
New facial recognition features will detect photos of you across Facebook
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We recently reported about Facebook’s captcha that requires your selfie if your account gets locked. Yesterday they announced a couple of new features, again focusing on the photos of your face. The new tools rely on facial recognition, and according to Facebook, they will “help people better manage their identity” on this social network.
Facebook’s new captcha asks for selfies if your account gets locked
by 8 CommentsIf you happen to be locked out of your Facebook account, you may soon need to upload a selfie to prove your identity and be able to log back in. As a matter of fact, it seems that Facebook has already started implementing this captcha. In case they notice suspicious activity on your account, you will be asked to “upload a photo of yourself that clearly shows your face.” After it’s verified, you will be allowed to log back in.
UK police make their first arrest using facial recognition technology
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The South Wales Police confirmed this Tuesday that they’ve arrested a man thanks to the automatic facial recognition technology (AFR). As they confirmed to Ars Technica, this was the first time AFR was used to perform an arrest, although it has been used for a while by the UK police forces.
The officers used a camera-equipped surveillance van to scan the passers-by. The AFR recognized the face of a man from the police’s database, which led to the arrest.
Facial recognition technology helps Chinese man find his family after 27 years
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This time last year, there was a pretty big fuss about FindFace, an app that uses facial recognition to discover people’s identities with pretty high reliability. But for 33-year-old Fu Gui from China, facial recognition technology turned out to be life changing. It helped him find his family and reunite with them after being apart for 27 years.
This Chrome plugin shows you how Facebook sees what’s in your photos
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There’s been a lot of buzz lately around AI, “deep learning”, computer vision. It’s all to do with image recognition. Apple and Google have also been implementing it with their mobile operating systems to help categorise your shots. Facebook also does this, too, although it rarely makes itself obvious. It’ll often see faces, and ask if you want to tag somebody. Sometimes it’ll even recognise the person. But that’s about it.
Facebook actually looks at a whole lot more, though. If you want to go digging through page source, you can find this information out yourself. But, it’s a bit of a hassle. Now, a new Chrome extension overlays the information right on top of the image in your browser. While primarily intended for those who use screen readers, it does offer insight into how Facebook automatically reports or censors certain images.
Can someone snap a photo of me in the street and use it to identify me?
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With facial recognition technology you can take pictures of people in the street, run them through publicly available photographs online, and get a match.
You would have heard this statement if you had been listening to the 20 September 2016 episode of Seriously on BBC Radio 4, called ‘The Online Identity Crisis’. I only heard it yesterday, though, as I caught up with it by podcast. It did, however, set me thinking. Just how likely, or easy, is it that someone should take a photo of me in the street, run said image through facial recognition software, and be able to identify me?
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