Why face recognition isn’t scary – yet

July 9 2010

(CNN) — Most of the time, Stacey Schlittenhard finds facial recognition technology to be extremely useful. When she uploads her family photos to the website Picasa, for instance, the program automatically tags her friends and family members. This lets her share the photos easily and saves her hours of organization.

As she uses facial recognition programs, Schlittenhard is coming face to face with a fact that has been troubling computer scientists for decades:

It’s hard to teach a machine to know a human face — and it’s harder still to teach a computer to identify one face from any other. That may be comforting news for people worried about governments using facial recognition systems to surveil the public — in effect, ending anonymity.

Technologists say those ideas exist only in science fiction movies — at least for now.

On July 1, for example, Facebook announced it would give its users the ability to use facial detection software to select faces from photos on the site.

Facebook’s new feature only selects faces. It doesn’t identify the people in photos by name. But in a blog post, Facebook product manager Sam Odio said that updates to this system will be coming.

*As shown in this photo illustration, software that recognizes or detects faces has been added to sites like Facebook and Picasa.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/07/09/face.recognition.facebook/index.html