I’ve always heard the term facial recognition but never really thought too much into it. Recently I’ve been hearing more and more talk of it so decided to look further into this technology, especially since privacy is at a rapid decrease. Facial recognition is a computer application for automatically identifying or verifying a person from a digital image or a video frame from a video source. One of the ways to do this is by comparing selected facial features from the image and a facial database (wikipedia.com).
The executive chairman of Google warned governments against facial recognition technology. He said it’s “too creepy” even for Google. Talk about violation of privacy. Worst off is that it is used by many social media companies. Facebook uses facial recognition programs, which allow users to tag photos of people that are uploaded to the site. iPhone 4 has a very unique way of unlocking your cell phone. Instead of typing in a password, what the phone has is the facial recognition software. I watched a small preview of it on youtube, and I have to say.. it’s pretty impressive. At least this phone will give you the option of either entering the security code or letting the phone recognize your facial features in order to unlock. Here’s a short video clip link for anyone interested. It definitely caught my attention. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUmCfe7xqBg
With all these advancements going on, I can only image what’s to come in the next 5 to 10 years.
