Are you a privacy freak? Well beware! Facebook ’s new algorithm can recognize people in photographs even when their faces are hidden. Recently it was unveiled that Facebook’s artificial intelligence lab have created an algorithm that works on identifying the person in pic when his/her face is covered or hidden. This algorithm is built with prospect to study the other human characteristics of a person and then match these characteristics with current Facebook profile which leads to find the identity of person.
The algorithm basically looks for other unique characteristics like hairdo, clothing, body shape and pose that will help identify the person. Yann LeCun, head of artificial intelligence at Facebook, wanted to see if modern face-recognition algorithms could be adapted to recognize people in situations where someone’s face is not clear. For this, research team pulled almost 40,000 public photos from photo sharing site, Flickr – some of people with their full face clearly visible, and others where they were turned away – and ran them through a sophisticated neural network. The results were astonishing where the final algorithm was able to recognize people’s identities with 83 percent accuracy! The results were presented at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Boston, Massachusetts recently.
“We humans can already recognize people with these cues quite well. People have characteristic aspects, even if you look at them from the back”
– Yann LeCun, head of artificial intelligence at Facebook
According to LeCun, such a tool would be useful for people who are privacy-conscious as it could alert them whenever a photo of themselves, however obscured, pops up on the internet. However, just like every thin, there could be other part for this tool too! The ability to identify someone even when they are not looking at the camera raises some serious privacy concerns. The fact that you can still be identified even if you hide your face could seriously damage the person’s identity in various scenarios! Now, whether this kind of tools will prove to be useful or harmful can only be told based on how it is used by individual. Let’s hope that, even if this kind of tools are available for everyone to use we use them in rite spirit!
