Back during Siggraph 2004, Columbia University presented a paper on extracting environment maps and illumination information from people's eyes in photos. What's cool is that a 3D facial model is reconstructed by 'simply waving a light in front of the face' (see video). No need for stereoscopic cameras, structured lighting or 3D scanners. Still, reading the paper, it sounds like there's a lot of manual tweaking involved. In any case, very neat idea.
Gizmag notes that Bioscrypt introduced the VisionAccess 3D face reader to secure facilities via facial recognition. The interesting part is that it analyzes 40.000 measurements of the surface structure of the face using a 'real-time 3D surface scanner' in invisible near-infrared light. It's not clear to me how this 3D surface scanner operates, even after watching the presentation by Rice University about the underlying scanner/camera technology. Apparently, the infrared camera allows it to view 'under the skin' to find more robust facial reference points. From the Bioscrypt video it seems it's building a 3D model of the face. So is it using an infrared-based structure-light version of their VisionAccess 3D EnrolCam product range? Note Bioscrypt is now owned by L1 Identity Solutions which sells controversial 'crime control' solutions to China.
According to DetectorPro, Google's search product management director R.J. Pittman announced that they are working on introducing facial recognition to improve their image search. Looks like Polar Rose will be getting some competition.
Google's Street View, which allows people view and move through 3D photographic destinations from street level, is introducing a post-processing stage on the images it captures with its Google Car to detect and blur out people's faces. This followed complaints by privacy advocates and unwittingly captured members of the public. Good!
Key Lemon is distributing a free version of its facial password program to enable users to log into their Windows-only systems using their face and their webcam. Haven't tried it so don't take my word for it.
Coolbusinessideas and TechCrunch note the launch of Tuyuan, a Beijing-based social networking site which employs facial recognition to find friends for its members. Details are still hazy but apparently once users upload a photo and tag a person, the site automatically suggests other pictures it thinks the same person is in. So it seems like an advanced version of Facebook's Friend Finder.
Facebook could probably add this functionality rather straightforwardly by licensing technology from Polar Rose, a Swedish startup that introduced last year a facial search engine in beta. Or maybe Polar Rose is building a Facebook App to this end themselves! Polar Rose seems to be actively hiring and expanding, working on some cool video-based facial recognition from video and a browser plugin but I couldn't clearly make out their business model from their website.
If you want your 3D Face to base itself on the most attractive photos of yourself, you have several alternatives:
One involves going through through this:
The other is to use Portrait Professional by Anthropics. The Portrait Professional software uses prior knowledge about human faces to automate the retouching of portraits. Not only does it remove pimples, wrinkles, red-eyes, shiny skin but it also whitens teeth/eyes and reshapes certain aspects of your face to make it more attractive. The results are impressive and only require a minimal amount of user input, although fine-tuning is also possible.
Dolores Labs launched FaceStat.com, a more sophisticated version of HotOrNot.com. Your photo is rated by its members and Amazon's Mechanical Turk for Age, Gender, Ethnicity, Weight, Relationship status, Intelligence, Political affiliation, Intoxicated, Trustworthy, Attractive.
The DailyMail details how the UK supermarket chain Budgens is using facial biometrics to identify minors who has previously been unable to prove they are 18 when buying alcohol.
"Customers' images are monitored and relayed to a control centre to be compared with under-18s already on record.
Future options include other retailers linking the scheme to their shops to create a giant database."
Orwellian overkill anybody? Or just a good excuse for a marketer's wet dream? How long before such a setup is compulsory in all off-license shops? And why not link it up to the police's offender's facial database while we're at it? I guess none of this will matter once the compulsary biometric National ID cards are introduced.
People will never learn... Welcome to Police State Britain.
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