Engineers Test Highly Accurate Face Recognition

Whoa, this is really exciting! :) Personally, I've always been thinking about how to solve this kind of problem - how do you make a machine recognize a face? And now someone's gone and redefined the rules of the game - finally an algorithm that should be able to do even better than a human at recognizing faces.

Caveat: the algo works only for frontal views so far. But I reckon with sufficient brute force, the algo should be able to figure out side views and back views too.

(The Home Team may want to take note... Mas Selamat had better take note - his disguises aren't going to be much use in future...)

It's (to put it simplistically) the application of some linear algebra (with multiple dimensional spaces). Scanned through the paper and was thinking, whoa, these guys are geniuses.

But what's even more exciting about this kind of pattern-recognition algorithm is not so much that a computer can now recognize faces, but the fact that facial-recognition algorithms belong to a general class of pattern-recognition algorithms.

That means if you can solve for facial-recognition, you can solve for other types of pattern-recognition problems such as identifying spam, terrain recognition, shopping preferences, voice-recognition and so on.

But the dark side is that, since this kind of facial-recognition algo is now proven to be able to recognize faces despite heavy disguises, privacy concerns are going to be a very real issue. How much more harder will it be for innocent fugitives to flee persecution... I read in The Heavenly Man by Brother Yun, a Chinese Christian, that the Chinese police had hidden sophisticated Chinese voice-detection devices at the airport counter in an attempt to capture him.

(But there's a joyful ending to this distressing episode - the Lord had specifically told him not to speak at all throughout the entire check-out process at the airport until he had left China. And when the authorities asked him what his name was (a standard procedure), he simply glared hard at them, until they let him through with a confused expression. Yet another amazing proof that there is absolutely no plan or power or technology that can succeed against the Lord. Amen! :D)

Hee. Anyway, I wonder... if I could try this for Facebook? Hmm. Maybe not... the linear algebra's way above my head.