Augmented Planet » face recognition

Ice Cream Sandwich Face Recognition

lester — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:04:15 +0000

Sometime last year I said 2011 would be the year of face recognition. I thought come December we’d be knee deep in people waiving their phones in our faces that it would almost be second nature. It seems I jumped the gun a little. Not much mind, but a little.

iOS 5 added some new face tracking APIs but overall it was a little disappointing that we didn’t see any of the technology from the recently acquired Polar Rose implemented in a bigger way. If you happened to have been following the launch of the new Galaxy Nexus from Samsung, running the about to be released Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android, you may have spotted that face recognition is also part of the OS.

In the teaser video below its difficult to see how deep face recognition goes and how else it can be used, but we do know you’ll be able to unlock your phone by looking at the camera.

Samsung Galaxy Nexus

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F_ke3rxopc

Mobile Face Recognition Coming Soon?

lester — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 16:01:34 +0000

I stuck my neck on the line at the beginning of the year and said that 2011 would be the year of face recognition. It’s nearly August and so far face recognition technology for mobile devices has yet to make a significant appearance.

I was somewhat disappointed that Apple didn’t announce face recognition with iOS 5 back in June, particularly as they acquired Swedish company Polar Rose (famous for the demo below) at the end of last year.

According to 9To5Mac however a couple of APIs have been discovered in the latest beta of iOS 5 that give credence to face recognition making an appearance later this year. The newly discovered APIs are:

hasLeftEyePosition
hasRightEyePosition
hasMouthPosition
leftEyePosition
rightEyePosition
mouthPosition

Polar Rose

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QBLKBYrgvk

Polar Rose are were not the only company experimenting with mobile face tracking. At Mobile World Congress in February I met with US based company Viewdle who were showcasing some amazing demos.
They recently released a beta of their Android face recognition app which can be found here. I haven’t looked into it yet so feel free to share you comments.

Perhaps the last half of 2011 will be the year of face recognition.

Viewdle

www.youtube.com/watch?v=A10tgE9YQDo

2012 The Year of Face Recognition

lester — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 11:13:06 +0000

While 2011 is being billed by industry experts as the year of the Tablet, I am going to make the early claim that 2012 will be the year of face recognition.

Ever since seeing early demos of Augmented ID by Swedish company TAT which used the face recognition SDK by Polar Rose, it’s just been a matter of time before we have face recognition power in our smartphones. Polar Rose were acquired by Apple back in September 2010 which has led many to believe that the iPhone 5 will have face recognition capabilities, and I tend to agree that the next version of the iPhone will have some face recognition aspects. However while some bloggers feel that iPhone will use this technology as a security feature, i.e. unlocking the phone automatically when the use picks up the device, I think the technology will be used in a more subtle way.

My guess is that Apple will use the Polar Rose technology as a way to tag individuals in photos and possibly videos. As you take a picture using the iPhone camera each individual will be identified and tagged enabling you to search for all the pictures that containing the same individual or automatically upload the tagged photos to Facebook, (or wherever). I would be very surprised if the functionality is more sophisticated and incorporates live social media profiles of individuals in the camera view. I.e. while pointing the camera at an individual you see their recent tweets or Facebook updates. While there are companies building these solutions I think it’s a step to far to assume it will be such an integrated experience with the next iPhone. iPhone 6 however will give Apple developers enough time to experiment with the functionality and make face recognition a core part of the camera technology.

Since Polar Rose was acquired the face recognition SDK has been withdrawn for download, but fear not, particularly if you’re an Android developer. At Mobile World Congress this year I met up with a company called Viewdle who have taken up the mantel of face recognition on mobile devices. The demo I saw was a prototype that instantly recognised an individual when an Android device was pointed in their direction. Once the individual was recogniesd their social media profile include Facebook and recent tweets was displayed. It’s the first step to a future where you’ll be able to use your smartphone to point at individuals and see who they are and how to connect with them. There is privacy storm brewing there but that’s a story for another time. In the meantime however, if the finished Viewdle product is half as good as their marketing video we are in for a real treat.

Viewdle

Viewdle – Photo and Video Face Tagging from Viewdle on Vimeo.

If you can’t wait for the mobile solution, Viewdle have desktop version that will automatically tag photos on your PC and upload them to Facebook. You can download the app here: http://viewdle.com/products/desktop/index.html

Microsoft Face Recognition
Microsoft Research in Israel have also being working on face recognition and have recently released a short video showing some of their work. You can imagine this technology finding its way into their gaming platforms.

Augmented ID
For those that missed the original ground breaking demo from TAT, here is the original demo based on Polar Roses SDK. This technology was acquired by Apple in September 2010.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb0pMeg1UN0

Face recognition for mobile devices will no doubt be huge. The ability to automatically tag individuals in your photos and search for other pictures where they are featured will be just the start. In 2012 perhaps we’ll all be using our smartphones to see who is around us and what they are thinking.

Kafkara for Android

lester — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 21:03:41 +0000

Some of the first mobile augmented reality applications I can remember (excluding browsers) were applications that let you add hats, beards, moustaches and other assorted paraphernalia to photos. Defacing your mother-in-law as she snored through a football match you were trying to enjoy was strangely therapeutic. Their augmentedness was always questionable however.

Kafkara is application for the Android that takes that concept a bit further and is most definitely an augmented reality app. Here instead of adding features to a 2D photo, a person’s face is texture mapped onto a 3D avatar and shown in augmented reality. In essence, you can map a face on to a 3D object like a bee. The best way to describe Kafkara is it’s like the Ironman or Transformers demo from Total Immersion but without the huge production values.

You can create the faces either by taking a photo of a person, or by grabbing their picture from either Facebook or Twitter. Once you have the picture, the application also uses the Google Text To Speech Engine and will animate the person’s lips speaking whatever you typed. Finally to complete the package, the app has a radar feature that shows what other Kafkara avatars have been created near you.

Kafkara is also completely free, so iIf you have an Android and you fancy a bit of 3D face manipulation fun be sure to take a look. If you’re a 3D model expert then get in touch with the developers as they are looking for some assistance with creating new avatars and I’m sure would appreciate your help.
Get it from the Android Market Place or use the QR Code

Machine Infers Persons Interest From His Eye Movement

lester — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 17:21:07 +0000

For those of you that are eager to get your hands on augmented reality glasses and see what the future holds for facial recognition. Here is an interesting announcement from Aalto University with a rather neat video showing the system in action.

A method developed in Aalto University retrieves information to data glasses about people and objects a person is looking at. Equipment including an eye tracker implements machine learning methods and infers from context and gaze direction what the viewer may be interested in, to learn more about. Following that the machine displays additional information on viewer’s data glasses. For instance, a researcher may learn about scientific results of a researcher passing by and singles may see on their data glasses the relationship status of a person they meet. By following the eye-movement the machine also infers when additional information should be displayed.

In the test versions of the augmented reality (AR) method displayed information is retrieved from a database with information keyed in beforehand. However, the method can also be set to retrieve information from internet and social media. In this case searches – using Google among others – can be made by looking through the data glasses only.

The equipment recognizes persons looked at. It requires that images of the persons to be recognized have been inserted into database earlier. At the moment, it is not possible to identify totally unknown persons.

Our basic research on machine learning methods has made it possible to create new advanced user interfaces in which the machine infers without direct human commands what the viewer is interested in, tells professor Samuel Kaski from Aalto University.

As a result of our research we have created a prototype that has been successfully tested in laboratories. However, there is still a way to go before this can be commercialized, reminds researcher Jorma Laaksonen from Aalto University.

Study about the new machine learning methods is to be published in the Virtual Reality journal. The research results have been reached with funding from private companies and organizations to Aalto University’s MIDE research programme.

Information about the research consortium:
http://mide.tkk.fi/en/UI-ART

Preprint version of the article to be published in Virtual Reality:
http://research.ics.tkk.fi/mi/papers/vire10.pdf

System in action

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtuGSWDVdQU

Mobile Face Recognition

lester — Thu, 13 May 2010 10:38:59 +0000

For those of you at the Augmented Planet event yesterday in London, firstly thanks for coming. I will write a wrap-up blog soon but before I do that…

I spoke about mobile augmented reality and how face recognition has evolved beyond the concept stage. The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) based in Sweden are the company that I was referring to.

Take a look at the video below to see how it works.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb0pMeg1UN0

The application uses Polar Rose’s FaceLib recognition engine, the prototype is working on Android devices but as far as I can see, it hasn’t been released yet.

MWC highlights and the next Augmented Planet event

lester — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:05:46 +0000

Greetings from Barcelona, the last few days have been Mobile World Congress. I was running an augmented reality discussion group on Thursday for the Wireless Industry Partnership at the MWC Mobile Jam. Along with my panel of experts, David Caabeiro (Sequence Point Software), Dan Romescu (Augmented Citizen) and Cristina Puig (Visual Century who I will talk about in a later post) we met some really interesting people and had some fantastic discussions. Everything from UI design, should developers build plug-ins for other mobile augmented reality products (eg Layar/Wikitude) or should they create their own. One app verses many apps was a consistent theme along with how do developers make money from augmented reality when so many applications are free. Lots of blogging ammo for another day.

Incidentally, David Caabeiro has open sourced the ARound project, so if you are a Symbian developer and are looking to build an augmented reality browser you can get the source code from here.

In Rouli’s (ARTimes) predictions for 2010 I predicted that by the end of the year we’ll have face recognition on mobile devices. You may recall the excellent TAT concept video showing the future of mobile face recognition (below), I am happy to report that TAT have a working prototype which I manged to catch a demo of at the show. It’s still in the concept stage so not as robust as the video but I can confirm that mobile face recognition is here. Pretty amazing stuff.

I also predicted that augmented reality mapping/navigation would arrive, Mobilizy were the worthy winner of the NAVTEQ challengeat MWC for their Wikitude Drive product. The NAVTEQ challenge is an annual competition designed to recognise the best innovation on their mapping platform. They give away a ton of prizes so well worth keeping an eye on their developer program for future events.

Prediction wise I am doing pretty well and it’s only February.

Planning for Augmented Planet 2010 is well underway, we have located a venue in London Soho and are figuring out what the agenda will be. We’ll shortly be sending out a survey to see if you want a full day or an evening event and to help us focus on the right content. We are also thinking about visiting a few cities so if you are not in London (we have lots of Canadian, US, and Far Eastern readers) then be sure to complete or survey and if we get enough interest we may pay your city a visit.

That’s it from me in Barcelona, time for lunch and then 7 hours at the airport.

TAT Augmented ID – now a reality (almost)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb0pMeg1UN0