Swedish mobile software firm The Astonishing Tribe has created an app that allows you to gather information on a person and their social networking life simply by pointing your camera phone at their face. Dubbed Recognizr, the app combines face recognition technology, cloud computing, and augmented reality.
Face recognition software creates a 3-D model of the person’s face and sends it to a server where it’s matched with an identity in the database. A cloud server conducts the facial recognition since and sends back the subject’s name as well as links to any social networking sites the person has provided access to. Sweden’s Polar Rose developed the face recognition technology.
The Swedish firm is not the only company to experiment with real-time facial recognition.
A new product, Google Goggles hopes to bring Mobile Image Recognition to the mainstream.
The concept is dead simple – a user snaps a photo of an object around them, be it a book, building, text or any other object, and the app will return search results tailored for that object.
Snap a photo of a book you’re interested in, for example, and goggles will return reviews, table of contents, links to purchase the book and anything else residing in Google’s index that might be relevant. Google says it fuzzed out the people recognition feature of the software due to “privacy concerns”.
Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt got some privacy advocates agitated recently with a naïve attitude toward privacy, notes John Dvorak. Schmidt said:
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.”
Google says it has developed a kind of quantum computer capable of identifying objects that appear in digital photos and videos. According to the company, the system outperforms the classical algorithms running across its current network of worldwide data centers.
A so-called quantum computer may be able to perform tasks that are currently thought impossible to do efficiently on a normal computer, such as breaking current encryption standards.
