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If you enjoy getting informed about latest technologies which impact the life very differently and highly, you are aware that hearing about some of the technologies seem very filmy or even abstract and sometimes hard to believe as a truth. There were time people thought that nothing heavier than the air can fly in the air; now there are the times when the airplanes are the reality. Well, the places of airplane and air changed over the time and there are new technological innovations are taking the places eg. alternative fuels (tried a lot of things by the experts as the same, including water, bio-fuel and a lot of others), alternative energy sources (including taking the maximum of the solar energy); this list could be endless. Of course this running to conquer the new horizons makes homo sapience sapience, the brainy humans. It helps not only surviving in the changing times but explore the boundaries of the stuff unknown or seems like magic or unanswered yet.
Well, lets talk something about what may not be that much fascinating, watched on the movie screens so many times and considered as complicated technology which may or may not work with 100% accuracy always; the face recognition. There are tons of mathematical calculation and scenarios involved in the process. Identifying the person from the photo and collect and provide the related information from the large database (which might be spread on several servers) is a challenge in itself.
There is a company named Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (PittPatt) which develops software related to face recognition (both images and videos). Frankly as we haven’t used any of the products personally, we cannot tell more about the quality, accuracy and performance of the same. Let’s provide you the brief information about the company. According to the official site of the company “PittPatt was founded in 2004 as a spin-off from Carnegie Mellon University after nearly ten years of research in object recognition conducted by Dr. Henry Schneiderman as both a student and faculty member of the CMU Robotics Institute. Dr. Schneiderman is joined by co-founder, fellow CMU PhD graduate and former University of Florida Professor, Dr. Michael Nechyba, and fellow CMU PhD graduate, Dr. Michael A. Sipe.”
Why we are talking about the same now. Well, before a few days (15th June 2011 to be precise), in the article, Search Similar Images For An Image Via Google – News ThinkerViews, we discussed a new feature for Google Image search. Now, gotta know that the company PittPatt is acquired by Google.
According to the official page at http://www.pittpatt.com/documentation/sdk.htm the team says “We are happy to announce that Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition has been acquired by Google!”. In continuity of the message they wrote “Joining Google is the next thrilling step in a journey that began with research at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute in the 1990s and continued with the launching of Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (PittPatt) in 2004. We’ve worked hard to advance the research and technology in many important ways and have seen our technology come to life in some very interesting products. At Google, computer vision technology is already at the core of many existing products (such as Image Search, YouTube, Picasa, and Goggles), so it’s a natural fit to join Google and bring the benefits of our research and technology to a wider audience. We will continue to tap the potential of computer vision in applications that range from simple photo organization to complex video and mobile applications.” See the link?!
We might be seeing more accurate “related image search” by providing a photo in future at Google image search. Same can be applicable to the videos. Right now we experience of finding a lot of irrelevant videos as the search result due to wrong or misleading tags and description. This problem may also overcome in the future. So as we see in the Hollywood movies that the protagonist (or even the antagonist) and its supportive technical team finds the target by providing the image of the target to the computer software, which tracks down the details by doing face recognition. It could be the facility which will be there for the people having internet connection (same way most of the spy gadgets which were exclusive to James Bond and his mates are now available and affordable to the common man).
Well, lets look forward to the outcome of the merger. You can share your views about the same by posting comments via the form below.
