Facebook has revealed that it no longer needs to see your face to recognise you in a photo – and we are equal parts fascinated and creeped out.
The folks at Facebook’s artificial intelligence lab have been busy plotting to improve their recognition algorithm so that it can recognise a person without seeing their face, much like a human can.
The New Scientist reports that the algorithm looks for other noticeable features like hairstyle, body shape, clothes and pose to identity a person.
Yann LeCun, head of artificial intelligence at Facebook said: “There are a lot of cues we use.
“People have characteristic aspects, even if you look at them from the back.
“For example, you can recognise Mark Zuckerberg very easily, because he always wears a gray T-shirt.”
Tests on 40,000 Flickr photos indicated 83 per cent recognition accuracy for the algorithm.
The feature, which was presented earlier this month at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference in Boston, has raised some concerns over privacy.
A researcher at Carnegie Mellon CyLab. Dr. Ralph Gross has flagged that the algorithm may worry people, although he did deem it “impressive”.
He said: “If even when you hide your face, you can be successfully linked to your identify, that will certainly concern people.
“Now is a time when it’s important to discuss these questions.”
Last week, talks over facial recognition rules collapsed after privacy advocates and industry groups could not agree.
