Amateur Facial Recognition Creeps Closer

The ability for everyday users of search engines to query particular faces is creeping closer. Google OS reports that Google has (kind of quietly) added a feature to their Image Search service to restrict the results to people’s faces. For example, a basic search for “Zimmer” in Image Search provides varied results, ranging from the exotic car, pictures of rooms (sprechen zie Deutsch?), and some photos of people. But searching with the special characters “&imgtype=face” appended to the query results in nothing but faces (mine included).

It seems Google is starting to take advantage of their acquisition of the facial recognition company Neven Vision a while back. First step to distinguish a face from a non-face. Next step perhaps to distinguish between faces? Then what?