helmetiblog

There was one more site that I should add to my sick-day list: Kristen and her commenters got me to try the MyHeritage Face Recognition site, which matches your face in a picture you upload against celebrity faces. It then yields your best matches and its certainty scores.

I go through something of a three-step process when I hear about a service like this: denial, testing, and vindication. How well could it actually work? Truth be told, my process is often arrested after the first step. In this case, I don't doubt that good facial recognition software exists, but I do doubt it exposed on the web as a novelty. The workflow for innovative input has stops at military, law enforcement, expensive and commercial before it gets to trivial.

So I was sick, didn't feel like reading and decided to try the second of my three-step process: testing. I ran a photo of myself taken a couple of years ago in ceremonial Beninese garb through the system. It came from my photo site at http://photos.helmetica.com. I was square to the camera with my face unobstructed as per the instructions. And I was impressed with the site -- it has a pleasing, dynamic and responsive interface and cleanly delineated my face in the photo. The one drawback was the mandatory registration (see the aside below).

And for the results:

Look-alikes: Sigourney Weaver 54% Orlando Bloom 53%

Hmm, interesting. I've listed the top two matches and their corresponding certainty scores. I wasn't sure what to expect, though, so I can't speak to its correctness. That'll require a few more tests:

	Elvis Costello 61% Steven Soderbergh 60%
	Vivien Leigh 65% Kingsley Amis 65%
	Paul Simon 58% Walther Nernst 53% ?!?!

Conclusion:

The highest certainty score achieved against one of my pictures was 65%, and of the total of 40 celebrities I look like (4 tests x 10 celebrities each) there were no repeats between tests. This wasn't exhaustive, and each of the photos I uploaded had unique elements to them: glasses, facial hair, proximity and focus, etc. But they were all taken within six months of each other, and the results were quite varied. The glasses were important, as eight of the ten resultant photos also showed glasses. But facial hair seemed to carry little weight, with no bearded or mustached figures returned in the third test and only four in the fourth (the fourth also including Penelope Cruz and Greta Garbo). So much for my yes-or-no, Guess Who hypothesis.

Overall, I'm not sure what to make of the face recognition service. My photos all turned up different look-alikes, and I couldn't see the similarities. That said, I have no evidence to the contrary, and no celebrities I feel strongly to resemble. And most important, I guess, is that it was fun to use.

**
An aside about data quality: in order to use the face recognition novelty service, MyHeritage requires you to provide your email address, your name and other personal information. This is likely tied to their larger mission on the web: genealogy. Now as someone who is only interested in the novelty, and only once at that, I'm not likely to provide my actual data, but rather to fill in the blanks with whatever occurs to me. I'm obviously interested in something MyHeritage has to offer, but haven't been sold on the value of signing up in earnest. If you want someone's information, convince him or her that it's necessary in order to provide something of value; if not, your customers will be less satisfied and your data will be junked-up with a bunch of John Does or Asdf Jkl;s.