Come out, come out, wherever you are, the whispered and sneaky voice of Daddy Facebook dictates straight into your ear. Big Brother unveiled new research conducted in the area of face recognition. The Facebook facial recognition feature will soon be rolling out, making us more vulnerable, exposed and depriving us from our right to privacy.
New algorithms are allowing for faces to be instantly recognized based on contextual information only, such as hairstyle, clothing and body shape. In other words, even if you don’t want to show yourself in pictures, Facebook will spot you on and reveal your presence.
Quite scary, eh? It’s getting harder and harder to escape the claws of the internet and soon enough anonymity will be a privilege we will all crave for. It seems that facial recognition has been expanding at a rapid pace in recent years both in commercial products and by law enforcement. It’s funny how capitalist societies that hold the freedom flag above their foreheads don’t allow for private life to unfold in normal conditions anymore. As paradoxical as it sounds, this is the world we’ve created.
According to Facebook researchers, the facial recognition system called Pose Invariant Person Recognition (PIPER) is accurate 83% of the time, a far higher rate than the current most advanced system, which requires clear and full frontal photos to offer accurate results.
Face recognition algorithms have become so good that they already found their way into social networks, shops and even churches. This really sounds hilarious, only thinking that during prayer, a machine silently spots your particular features and reports your presence to authorities or to whomever indulges themselves into stalking private people, for whatever reason. The miracles of our holy churches and nothing less.
Head of artificial intelligence at Facebook has been running studies together with a team of experts, to see how the facial recognition algorithms could be adapted to recognize people in situations where their face isn’t clear.
Official declarations state that there are a lot of cues that can be used to improve the accuracy of facial recognition algorithms. People have particular features, even if you look at them from the back. This statement sounds like it’s been pulled out from a sci-fi scenario where people are imprisoned for being themselves. Well, it is mere reality and it happened with the help of people checking up on other people through 40.000 public photos extracted from Flickr. Yes, the research was based on public data extracted from Flickr and researchers ran the faces of anonymous people who had no idea what was happening with their holiday pictures through a sophisticated neural network, to come up with the fabulously accurate facial recognition algorithm.
Image Source: bankerinthesun.com
