Carnegie Mellon Demos the Power of Facial Recognition Using Star Trek [Gizmodo]

via Gizmodo by Jack Loftus on 4/26/09

Want to know how much screen time William Shatner commanded in Star Trek? Or how little Chekov received, for that matter? Carnegie Mellon has you covered, as it has "face mined" the entire series.

The powerful demo actually proves that facial data mining—real, accurate facial data mining—is coming to a Big Brother video search engine near you. The demo even does facial recognition from the side, as well as the obvious full-frontal we'd expect such an endeavor would have. "Non-frontal tracks" are planned for the future. Everything you see presented in the link was generated autonomously by the software, say the Carnegie Mellon folks.

Fun side game to play with this software: Spot the red shirts!

Note: There's no sound in the clips because of copyright restrictions. [Face Mining via Slashdot]

by Ben Pike