How Computers See Faces And Other Objects

Computers started to be able to recognize human faces in images decades ago, but now artificial intelligence systems are rivaling people’s ability to classify objects in photos and videos.

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That’s sparking increased interest from government agencies and businesses, which are eager to bestow vision skills on all sorts of machines. Among them: self-driving cars, drones, personal robots, in-store cameras and medical scanners that can search for skin cancer. There are also our own phones, some of which can now be unlocked with a glance.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Algorithms designed to detect facial features and recognize individual faces have grown more sophisticated since early efforts decades ago.

A common method has involved measuring facial dimensions, such as the distance between the nose and ear or from one corner of the eye to another. That information can then be broken down into numbers and matched to similar data extracted from other images. The closer they are, the better they match.