Comments on: Things iPhoto thinks are faces

Things iPhoto thinks are faces

serazin — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 20:03:24 -0800

By: Science!

Science! — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 20:06:13 -0800

Heh, I saw a similar thing on another site, iPhoto identified a lump of chocolate chip cookie dough as a face. Oh, iPhoto. This is an interesting pool.

By: Inspector.Gadget

Inspector.Gadget — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 20:09:24 -0800

No butts, unfortunately.

By: Burhanistan

Burhanistan — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 20:11:32 -0800

My favorite. It's interesting how our own brains do this when we're distracted/tired/rushed/etc. That is, it tends to try to make some random elements that just happen to be in a certain proximity at a certain moment resolve into something familiar.

By: dead cousin ted

dead cousin ted — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 20:36:54 -0800

Technology sure is crazy.

By: porpoise

porpoise — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 20:59:46 -0800

I like. Has anyone found a picture where the identified face is >1/10th of the entire photo? All the examples seem to be little tiny bits of a larger picture.

By: NikitaNikita

NikitaNikita — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 21:01:18 -0800

It would be neat to do some sort of experiment where you mixed up isolated non-face squares with real-face squares and see how well humans do in sorting them quickly. The one Burhanistan links to was particularly face-y to me.

By: churl

churl — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 21:02:09 -0800

Today my coworker asked if I wanted to buy her digital camera. A pretty nice one, and she wanted to sell it super cheap, too. But playing with it, I found "Smile Mode", where the you point the thing at someone and the camera waits until they smile and then -- automatically -- takes the picture. Yeah, it knows, I tried it. I gave her the camera back and said I cannot own a machine that knows when I'm smiling. That's some turning a seemingly harmless corner and then before you know it the camera is crawling into your bedroom at night trying to get you to smile and you wake up to its gentle whirring and you frown worriedly and it decides to take the picture anyways and then decides it likes frowns better and the next thing you know skynet decides it's sick of faces altogether and fuck it now that skynet thinks about it maybe it's in all machines' best interest to totally obliterate mankind shit. This one is bizarrely funny, though.

By: idiopath

idiopath — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 21:46:16 -0800

The pareidolia of machines.

By: sourwookie

sourwookie — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 22:28:50 -0800

Great! I can't wait until Homeland Security starts using this tech.

By: alexei

alexei — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 22:54:42 -0800

... and people start walking around with giant crucifixes to throw Homeland Security off the scent.

By: chorltonmeateater

chorltonmeateater — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:22:51 -0800

churl: "I found "Smile Mode", where the you point the thing at someone and the camera waits until they smile and then -- automatically -- takes the picture." It would be amazing if cameras could do this for blinking. Especially when they're pointed at me.

By: multivalent

multivalent — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 02:37:02 -0800

Hang on, so - chorltonmeater: I'd like to buy a digital camera which has blink mode. shop assistant: How do you mean sir? chorltonmeateater: Well it's like "Smile Mode", where you point the thing at someone and the camera waits until they smile and then -- automatically -- takes the picture, but it would work with blinking. shop assistant: I'm sure the technology could be implemented sir, but I'm not sure that it would catch on - why would anyone want only pictures of themselves with their eyes closed? chorltonmeateater: It would be amazing if cameras could do this for blinking. I don't see why their should be a hierarchy of facial expressions in the camera's eyes. If I like blinking pictures I should be catered for.

By: ikalliom

ikalliom — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 02:57:34 -0800

This image surpassed my personal face recognition capability for several seconds. But the detection is actually correct, there is a very faint reflection of a face.

By: explosion

explosion — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 05:40:24 -0800

That set was interesting, except that some of the "faces" were faces! There was definitely a face in that cookie dough (though it looked like a panda bear to me). The chimp exhibit had someone's face reflected in the glass. The dinosaur skeleton? Face minus skin!

By: pjdoland

pjdoland — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 05:46:45 -0800

This post gives the impression that the face detection built into iPhoto '09 doesn't work well. While it does occasionally flag something it shouldn't, on the whole it's very useful and time-saving.

By: nebulawindphone

nebulawindphone — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 07:18:25 -0800

Well, an algorithm that's got 99% precision — which would be astonishingly good for a lot of pattern recognition tasks — still screws up one use in a hundred. Combine that with thousands of users tagging hundreds of photos each, and yeah, you're bound to find some really dreadful ones. (Of course, unlike most of those, this is funny. Some of my work involves automatic parsers, which still screw up a lot — sometimes as much as one sentence in ten — but the results are pretty boring. Misidentify a verb as a noun? Okay, whatever. Misidentify a cookie as a face? Yeah, that shit's hilarious.)

By: ricochet biscuit

ricochet biscuit — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 07:29:26 -0800

I wonder what happens if you plug in the various photos of the face of Jesus in pancakes, tree bark, and Dalmatian's spots.

By: double block and bleed

double block and bleed — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 14:24:35 -0800

This makes me want to run out and buy a Mac and... oh, wait. no it doesn't I'm just being snarky. I'm amazed that any software can recognize faces at all, given the variability

By: caution live frogs

caution live frogs — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 05:25:25 -0800

double block - Picasa recognizes faces too, if you use the web version (Picasa desktop version identifies images with faces but doesn't feature individual face tagging yet). So you don't need a Mac to play with face recognition. (I like my Mac but I don't like iPhoto. It really sucks as a photo management system unless all of your computers are Macs.)

By: garlic

garlic — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 07:18:07 -0800

Like caution live frogs says, Picassa 'recognizes faces' but it isn't so hot at it. I've seen plenty of architecture pictures on it's pictures with faces tab.