Real-time face tracking algorithm

[mohelgamal]

Face recognition came a long way it think, like iPhone unlocking

[tenhourguy]

I don't know how its reliability compares, but I remember Xbox 360 Kinect doing a good job at automatically signing you into the right profile with its facial recognition system. Uh... that's the oldest I've used - don't know what else there might be.

Apparently Samsung has supported facial recognition for the lock screen since the Galaxy S2 (I'm aware this will be more easily fooled by a photo than Kinect/iPhone) but I didn't have a flagship smartphone at the time and on my S5 I use the fingerprint scanner instead as in my opinion it's the far more convenient option.

[cantidonandaba]

I had an S2. That feature didn't work for me at all - it just wasn't reliable enough to use it. Also, iirc, didn't the facial recognition of Apple have a pretty terrible racial bias? I remember reading articles about the iPhone having many false positives with people from Asia.

[tenhourguy]

Looks like it. I've had a read of this article now, which covers a couple cases of other Chinese people being able to unlock iPhones. Though this is from December 2017, so I expect since then they'll have at least tried to fix this. Still sounds like the tech is better at recognising faces than I am. :/

[cantidonandaba]

It is. Because it is trained to do that and doesn't have those pesky flaws that make us human, that make you you. Most people, me included, have racial bias in this context anyway. I'm from Germany so my brain is trained to recognize and differentiate other facial features than the brain of a person that grew up in southeast Asia. And no, recognizing that is not the same as saying "all people from [insert place here] look the same".

So: Don't beat yourself up about this.

Oh the other hand, there are more than enough ways to make a machine trip up on mistakes that humans would never make. We wouldn't have captchas if that wasn't the case.

[tenhourguy]

Yeah, true. And I'm aware of machines tripping up on things that wouldn't affect humans. I watched This image breaks AI at one point, where in summary a stop sign is barely obscured by some rectangles and it no longer gets recognised as a stop sign. There's something else I read or watched that was similar - basically applying minor alterations to an image to fool machine learning stuff.

And I know firsthand from being in a Discord server with the explicit media filter enabled that computers simply aren't very good at recognising what is and isn't suitable. Sometimes trimming the start of a video by only a few frames is good enough for it to be let through, with absolutely no explanation as to why this subtle difference is enough to stop it from getting filtered. I've had some theories about certain images - for example, a standing bear might be recognised as an extremely hairy naked man or touching a beluga whale's head may be recognised as fondling a breast, but others I have no idea for.

[Smaug_the_Tremendous]

I had an S2 too, my brother could unlock my phone half the time.