Face.com's API now recognizes moods | Hacker News Reader

Face.com's API now recognizes moods

developers.face.com

91 pointsbirsch21 comments

I love the potential for facial recognition in the future as long as their are no privacy issues and the public welcomes it without fears over privacy.

Here is my futuristic view of how this can be used, you walk into a Starbucks, it recognizes you, even if this is your first time entering this specific Starbucks, and you say the usual. Your coffee is ordered knowing your 'usual' at Starbucks. Your identity is already confirmed so payment is a breeze, perhaps a pin for extra security. Just a funky idea of what I could see sometime from now.

Seems like a whole lot of technology solving a problem I don't think many people have.

Let's keep in mind that they could already do this, relatively trivially, with far less technology, except you'd hand them your credit card first, instead of last.

I love the potential for facial recognition in the future as long as their are no privacy issues and the public welcomes it without fears over privacy.

Umm yeah. How would that work exactly?

One person's privacy issue is another person's feature request.

The main big negative implication that I can think of (and that caused Google to back off the research) is governments using it for surveillance. I think a lot of the potential features of the technology could be really cool, but that's a pretty serious negative.

"and that caused Google to back off the research". Do you have an article or other sources for this? It sounds very interesting.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/consumer-electronics/port... looks like they can do it "When you feed it 50 pictures... you will appear in the top 5 results half the time."

http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/06/08/face-recognitio...

"Google’s Eric Schmidt last week stated that facial recognition was the only technology the company has ever held back from the public. 'We built that technology and withheld it [because] people could use in a very bad way,' he said at the D9 conference"

seems like google just doesn't want to have too much negative backlash

Do you have any links on research on this area? I'm looking to have Ph.D. on this domain.

Unfortunately not, other than the links posted by dcheng and Eric Schmidt's comments I haven't seen anything else.

This reminds me a lot of some scene in minority report. Tom Cruise ended up having to inject his face with some chemical that completely changed his facial features. If this was the norm, people would have to resort to things like that to go unnoticed or hide.

I believe the technology is here (or not far from being here) for an augmented reality app that tags people you see in public with their RL names, occupations, etc. Scary, huh?

When will the YC funded 'Scanner Darkly' suits become available?

Wish it worked to detect explicit images also

Really like the idea of this, but I'm not sold on the accuracy. The example pic for 'angry' looks very much like someone pretending to be angry and is actually having a laugh, all you have to do is look at the eyes.

Would be interesting to hear from the developers of this on the extent to which the eyes and eyebrows are used in the analysis.

Noticed the same thing. But if you had to choose between putting that photo in a folder called "angry faces" or "happy faces", what would you choose? Of course, you'd hope the software would really be fine-grained enough to detect fake moods so you don't have to make that semi-arbitrary decision, but since it can't, I'm pretty happy with "angry".

I got dibs on a duckface (http://antiduckface.com/) detection and removal service for public websites like Facebook. :)

whats the availability of this for open source? it would be fun to hack with

I didn't find anything specific to open source, but in their FAQ[1] they say:

10. Is your API free?

Yes, our API is free, requires attribution and is subject to Rate Limiting. If necessary, these limits are also expandable for free through our Whitelisting program.

[1] http://developers.face.com/docs/faq/

how do they make money??

Serious companies that have lots of users and naturally exceed the free limits.

I couldn't see the free limits or the pricing for upgrades?

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