Photos Passport Photo vs. Composite
To gauge the general accuracy of FaceVACS, Jenkins and Burton submitted photos of celebrities known to be in the MyHeritage database. Of 459 images, the program correctly identified about half. But when the researchers used those photos to create composites of the celebrities and then submitted those to the Web site, FaceVACS correctly identified every one. "The performance shot up to 100 percent," said Jenkins. "This is a huge leap in a field where people get quite excited about improvements of 2 or 3 percent." "It's a new approach that not many people have studied," said Jonathon Phillips, an expert in biometric and automatic face recognition systems at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md. But, he pointed out, the morphing technique is not yet automated. Each image must be manually converted to grayscale, rotated, resized and cropped so that critical points on the faces, such as mouth and eye corners line up. The morphing and recognizing processes happen separately. "The question is how do you combine them into an effective technique?" said Phillips. Jenkins and Burton would like to see their method improved upon, but are going back to human experiments to tease out the range of differences people exhibit with their recognition skills. Related Links: |
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