recognition

Finding faces in Google Maps terrain

Something our human eyes seem to do, without any prompting, is to pick out shapes and structures that resemble other shapes and structures. Called pareidolia, it's a form of pattern recognition -- and a good example is the way we often see a human face where only a random collection of shapes or shadows exists. This, it is now known, is the reason for the infamous face on Mars.

Our own Earth, as folded and rippled as it is, is also prone to this phenomenon when viewed from above: the Badlands Guardian, discovered on Google Earth in 2006, for example. But we're sure there are many more human-esque faces lurking in strange corners of the Earth.

That is the premise behind Google Faces, a project by Berlin design studio Onformative: can pareidolia be imitated by a machine? Using OpenFrameworks, the studio has created an application that crawls Google Maps, using facial recognition algorithms to seek out areas that look like faces. … Read more

The looming big business of facial recognition

The odds are you are not just a face in the crowd any longer. Even if your picture isn't plastered all over social-networking and photo-sharing sites, facial recognition technology in public places is making it harder if not impossible to remain anonymous.

Lesley Stahl reports on the new ways this technology is being used that even has one of its inventors calling it too intrusive. Her "60 Minutes" report will be broadcast Sunday, May 19 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Professor Alessandro Acquisti of Carnegie Mellon, who researches how technology impacts privacy, stunned Stahl with an … Read more

Google smacks down reports that Now for iOS drains batteries

Hot on the heels of Google adding Now to its iOS app, a handful of users began complaining that the app update made their iPhone and iPad batteries drain more quickly. Questions arose, was Google Now slurping too much juice?

Google has responded that iOS battery life doesn't have anything to do with Google Now. The Web giant sent a statement to CNET giving a bit more explanation as to why the battery draining allegations were false.

Reports that Google Now on iOS drains battery life are incorrect. We understand people's concern about seeing the Location Services icon … Read more

Facial-recognition tech played no role in ID'ing bomb suspects

While surveillance video provided key images of the men suspected of planting bombs at the Boston Marathon, police use of facial-recognition software proved unhelpful in revealing their identities.

Despite several images of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev from the scene of the deadly bombings and the existence of images of the brothers in official government databases, facial-recognition software was unable to put names to their faces, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis told the Washington Post in an interview published Saturday. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has a Massachusetts driver's license, while Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder brother who died Friday after a shootout with … Read more

Why Amazon's every move doesn't mean a phone is coming

The rumor that Amazon has purchased the British startup behind Evi, the pseudo-Siri competitor, has again led to speculation about the fabled Amazon smartphone.

TechCrunch first reported the apparent purchase, citing its sources and recent changes reflected in some company records. It goes on to say that "smart observers might speculate that all these moves point towards Amazon developing a mobile handset/smartphone."

The evidence assembled certainly does seem to hint at some kind of relationship between Amazon and Evi Technologies, which makes the Evi app for Android and iOS. However, that apparent fact does little to bolster the case for an Amazon smartphone.… Read more

LookAway works, but that's about it

LookAway Player mimics the Smart Pause feature that will (as of this writing) soon be coming to the Galaxy S4, automatically pausing a video when you look away from your iPhone.

The app functions on YouTube only, so you will only be able to use LookAway Player's features on YouTube videos. In my testing it worked pretty much as advertised. Simply play a YouTube video, and when you turn your head to look away, facial-recognition software automatically pauses the video. When you turn back toward your iPhone, the video starts up again. It also worked when I looked down, … Read more

Windows Blue upgrades may be shown in leaked videos

Leaked videos that hit the Web today hint at a host of possibilities for Microsoft's next Windows release, codenamed Blue. Not only does it look like there might be improvements across the operating system, but also the speech recognition feature in Windows Phones could get a noteworthy upgrade.

The videos come via MSFTKitchen, which got its hands on internal videos from Microsoft's TechFest event a couple of weeks ago.

In the video that is presumably about Microsoft Blue, the company's chief technical strategy officer Eric Rudder hints that Microsoft has plans to boost their touch feature on … Read more

Samsung, LG may battle over eye-tracking technology

Samsung and LG Electronics could find themselves in another patent squabble, this time over eye-tracking technology.

Samsung's Galaxy S4 and LG's Optimus G Pro both will offer an eye-recognition feature that automatically reacts to the movement of the user's eyes.

The Galaxy S4 already comes built with Smart Scroll, which lets people scroll through the screen and trigger certain actions by moving their eyes up and down. The phone also includes Smart Pause, which pauses a video when a person looks away from the screen.

LG will add a Smart Video eye-recognition feature to its Optimus G … Read more

Google snaps up object recognition startup DNNresearch

Google has acquired a three-person Canadian research company that specializes in voice and image recognition.

DNNresearch, which was founded last year within the the University of Toronto's computer science department, specializes in object recognition and now belongs to Google.

As part of the deal, which was first reported by TechVibes, Google gets the technology and founder university professor Geoffrey Hinton, along with two graduate students -- Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever.

"Geoffrey Hinton's research is a magnificent example of disruptive innovation with roots in basic research," University of Toronto President David Naylor said in a statement. &… Read more

Protect your computer with KeyLemon's facial recognition

Beyond passwords, more computer users want more protection for their systems. KeyLemon for Mac provides an additional, functional layer of protection through facial recognition to unlock a computer.

Available as a free trial version, KeyLemon for Mac provides a basic level of functioning, but additional features may be unlocked with license upgrades. The program's native installer worked well and walked us through the setup and initial recognition procedure. The interface was fairly intuitive and spelled out the functions available. Some of the menus may be difficult to interpret for novice users, but those familiar with security software in general … Read more