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Comment by nasir | Hacker News Reader

One of the comments says:

I heard about the story a year ago, but forgot about it. Then I remembered and told my family about on Christmas. So I wanted to check out if this is still unsolved and found this reddit. I’m currently researching about AI and found a few image backwards search engines way more powerful then google image search. It turned out that I found the image of him holding the beer, when I fed in the card. Just wanted to play around, but it looks really promising now. ;D

https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_s...

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I don't know much about the state of the art in image recognition but does it really seem plausible? The picture of him holding the beer is not super high quality, he has a different expression, a slightly different haircut and he appears quite a bit older. You can't even see his distinctive freckles. The idea that you could just scan random images of people online and find him that way is wild to me, tuning the network not to miss it but also not to report millions of false positives seems like a very high bar.

It's pretty creepy if we're already at the point where any random people can trace you online using apparently unrelated low quality photos.

We don't know how much effort it took. The searcher could very well have gone through thousands of images, following up on hundreds, before zeroing in on this one. Or not-- I'd certainly like to know more about that part of the process.

i know little about the state of the art in image recognition, but it strikes me that this could be better described as facial recognition, and afaik, that does a pretty good job identifying faces

No idea is it is state of the art but I just tested PimEyes(the reverse image search service mentioned) with an old photo of me, it returned a bunch of photos of random people but also two of me within the first 30-40 results. One is older, 7-8 years maybe, and one is more recent, 2 years perhaps.

I have different facial expressions and the pose/angle is different than the one I submitted.

Thanks, I didn't read that deep into the comments.

So he used some face-recognizing engines that just indexes random images on the Internet? I wonder what it is, since he didn't name (I assume it's a public tool?). I knew Baidu has one, for what it's worth [1].

[1] https://ai.baidu.com/tech/face/search (in Chinese)

It seems so. He writes "They use facial recognition to find faces instead of google image search which is just comparing the similarities of the different pixels."

https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_s...

I took a look at [1], seems to require bringing your own training set, and hosting one with a huge set of random Internet images would presumably be prohibitively expensive.

Maybe I linked the wrong page, but I have used its API before, it does have a built-in database even with all the names of celebrities marked already.

It used to have a free trial on web too, but it's gone now.

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