News

Face detection – what does it mean

News
July 12
by chris eilers

Have you ever wondered how Snapchat can recognize our faces or how Facebook know that your face appears in a picture? It is all about face detection technology, read on. 

face detection

Face detection: Not so new

Face detection technology is well-known and not so hard to find, such tech is easily found inside the primary camera of any budget smartphones nowadays. Back to 1960s, it was a phenomenon, the first experiment was conducted and developed in secret. Back then, such model of facial recognition software needed human input more than these models produced today. More interesting, no one who lived in that time knew about this tech.

Face detection is commonly used for security purpose, especially for picking up criminals on the camera and password. The software now is packed in your smartphone camera to point out not only just the location of a face but also whether the person is smiling. In 2001, Paul Viola and Michael Jones invented a new framework for detecting arbitrary objects and refined it for face detection. The algorithm is now known as the Viola-Jones framework.

face detection

The software attempts to identify someone in an image by scanning the complete image at multiple scales with multiple locations per scale and measuring certain features of their face, like the distance between their eyes or the width of their nose. The researchers found that scaling the image by a factor of 1.25 each time produced the most accurate results.

Face detection: what is new in the future?

The question is about privacy, security and data transparency. Wearable devices like Google Glass or social media like Google, Facebook, Twitter are growing up, not just that they allow people to know who you are from a picture that you share. And this seems to be an invasion of privacy for some people. So the next question is: how can we protect ourselves from such technology?