Face.com's API now recognizes moods

jshort 14 years ago |

I love the potential for facial recognition in the future as long as their are no privacy issues and the public welcomes it without fears over privacy.

Here is my futuristic view of how this can be used, you walk into a Starbucks, it recognizes you, even if this is your first time entering this specific Starbucks, and you say the usual. Your coffee is ordered knowing your 'usual' at Starbucks. Your identity is already confirmed so payment is a breeze, perhaps a pin for extra security. Just a funky idea of what I could see sometime from now.

DTE 14 years ago | |

Seems like a whole lot of technology solving a problem I don't think many people have.

lbrandy 14 years ago | | |

Let's keep in mind that they could already do this, relatively trivially, with far less technology, except you'd hand them your credit card first, instead of last.

nl 14 years ago | |

I love the potential for facial recognition in the future as long as their are no privacy issues and the public welcomes it without fears over privacy.

Umm yeah. How would that work exactly?

One person's privacy issue is another person's feature request.

dcheng 14 years ago | |

This reminds me a lot of some scene in minority report. Tom Cruise ended up having to inject his face with some chemical that completely changed his facial features. If this was the norm, people would have to resort to things like that to go unnoticed or hide.

gonehome 14 years ago | |

The main big negative implication that I can think of (and that caused Google to back off the research) is governments using it for surveillance. I think a lot of the potential features of the technology could be really cool, but that's a pretty serious negative.

barefoot 14 years ago | | |

"and that caused Google to back off the research". Do you have an article or other sources for this? It sounds very interesting.

dcheng 14 years ago | | |

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/consumer-electronics/port... looks like they can do it "When you feed it 50 pictures... you will appear in the top 5 results half the time."

http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/06/08/face-recognitio...

"Google’s Eric Schmidt last week stated that facial recognition was the only technology the company has ever held back from the public. 'We built that technology and withheld it [because] people could use in a very bad way,' he said at the D9 conference"

seems like google just doesn't want to have too much negative backlash

johnx123-up 14 years ago | | |

Do you have any links on research on this area? I'm looking to have Ph.D. on this domain.

gonehome 14 years ago | | |

Unfortunately not, other than the links posted by dcheng and Eric Schmidt's comments I haven't seen anything else.

praptak 14 years ago |

I believe the technology is here (or not far from being here) for an augmented reality app that tags people you see in public with their RL names, occupations, etc. Scary, huh?

chopsueyar 14 years ago |

When will the YC funded 'Scanner Darkly' suits become available?

DanBlake 14 years ago |

Wish it worked to detect explicit images also

andrewingram 14 years ago |

Really like the idea of this, but I'm not sold on the accuracy. The example pic for 'angry' looks very much like someone pretending to be angry and is actually having a laugh, all you have to do is look at the eyes.

Would be interesting to hear from the developers of this on the extent to which the eyes and eyebrows are used in the analysis.

stdbrouw 14 years ago | |

Noticed the same thing. But if you had to choose between putting that photo in a folder called "angry faces" or "happy faces", what would you choose? Of course, you'd hope the software would really be fine-grained enough to detect fake moods so you don't have to make that semi-arbitrary decision, but since it can't, I'm pretty happy with "angry".

adyus 14 years ago |

I got dibs on a duckface (http://antiduckface.com/) detection and removal service for public websites like Facebook. :)

hezekiah 14 years ago |

whats the availability of this for open source? it would be fun to hack with

NSMeta 14 years ago | |

I didn't find anything specific to open source, but in their FAQ[1] they say:

10. Is your API free?

Yes, our API is free, requires attribution and is subject to Rate Limiting. If necessary, these limits are also expandable for free through our Whitelisting program.

[1] http://developers.face.com/docs/faq/

rodh257 14 years ago | | |

how do they make money??

adyus 14 years ago | | |

Serious companies that have lots of users and naturally exceed the free limits.

rodh257 14 years ago | | |

I couldn't see the free limits or the pricing for upgrades?