Friend Recognition

The plan

People (us) are terrible at remembering the names of other people, especially those we meet again after some time since the first meeting. We wanted to use facial recognition to be able to augment our memory, and give us some suggestions for who the person is.

We wanted to use IBM Bluemix's image recognition, but the API only gave us attributes such as possible age. Instead we settled on face++, and that put us into the process of actually building a set of faces. We used a preexisting set of faces, and picked ten of them more or less at random. We've spent the night learning how to send the right API requests to get the pictures added, detect the faces in the pictures, create a group of images and finally a face set.

This morning

We were able to (finally) get the face set trained so that we could do some face recognition. We tried matching a still photo of Harrison Ford as Han Solo to the face set. The API finds three candidates for who Han Solo is, although none of them are Harrison and none of the choices are made with high confidence.

This brought up an interesting point, that IBM Bluemix is able to evaluate faces for age; we'd definitely like to pursue using that as a factor in matching, so that we only try to match faces that are similar in (approximate) age.

In the future we're considering using profile photos of friends on Facebook, or linked people on LinkedIn as the face set, so as you're looking at someone in front of you, your device can pick from people that you already know (rather than trying to choose from a potentially much larger face set). We also see application in situations such as people experiencing dementia that struggle to identify people-- perhaps a list of suggestions that include names and photos would be enough to assist one's memory.

Finally, it should be noted that no evidence was gathered as to who shot first.

Our test pictures: https://www.airmanopus.net/wildhacks2015/lfw/ (we picked 10 at random to use as our face set) Our code: https://github.com/airmanopus/wildhacks2015 Uses the face++ API from http://www.faceplusplus.com/ to recognize faces in photos and match those faces to names

Built With

• facial-recognition
• html
• javascript