This is the second such purchase since 2006, when they picked up Neven Vision. Then just as now, it gives me the creeps that any company of this size and technical capability would start hoovering up companies specializing in facial recognition. Planetary scale biometrics, anyone?
Google uses facial recognition to automatically blur out faces in Street View. I imagine they have some fun ideas concerning Android as well.
Street View is just face detection (ie figure out where the faces are), and that technology has been around for years (it's even in bundled with the open source OpenCV library). This company does face recognition, which is the identification of individual people based on an image -- it's a very complicated problem.
imagine being able to search for faces in images and videos on the internet as easily as we can search for words in documents.
it would be amusing to find oneself in various peripheral crow footage / holiday photos. it might also have an effect on the porn industry. any other consequences?
Congrats to PittPatt! I work for one of their competitors, also from CMU.
Congrats to the PittPatt people on HN (I know there are one or two here)!
Go CMU!
I've been tracking this company for a while. I wonder when they will acquire some Paul Ekman products.