actionchrist recently posted about an interesting face recognition application on MyHeritage.com. You upload photos of yourself—or anyone—and it tries to match your selected image to celebrity images. I decided to test it out, using myself as a test. (Not so much because I am egotistical, but because I can take lots of pictures of myself without troubling anyone.) Matches over 80% are considered likely matches, over 60% are considered good, and matches between 40% and 60% are moderate matches:Test #1
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?Results:
Shahrukh Kahn (Bollywood actor) - 54%
Bedrich Smetana (Czech composer) - 51%
Paul Auster (author)- 51%
Christina Aguilera (sex symbol) - 47%
Yossi Benayoun (Israeli soccer player) - 46%
Jack Kerouac (author) - 46%
Kirk Hammet (heavy metal!) - 46%
Philp Glass (not quite metal) - 45%
Dean Martin (singer) - 43%
Jacques Rogge (olympic athlete) - 43%
The application defines its own region on the photos to analyze the face. When I manually narrowed the region, Kerouac jumped up to 55%, and Tiger Woods showed up at 46%.
Test #2
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?or
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?Results:
Bob Dylan (musician) - 65%
Anthony Kiedis (singer) - 63%
Isabella Rossellini (actress) - 59%
Tim Montgomery (olympic sprinter) - 43%
Tupac Shakur (rapper) - 43%
Elijah Wood (hobbit) - 41%
Keanu Reeves (Ted) - 40%
Jaco Pastorius (jazz musician) - 38%
This is the only time I got any results that were considered "good" matches.
Test #3
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?Results:
Katherine Hepburn (actress) - 58%
Aryton Senna (Brazilian race car driver) - 57%
Priyanka Chopra (Indian film actress) - 57%
Angelina Jolie (actress) - 56%
Rani Mukherjee (Bollywood actress) - 53%
Octavio Paz (author) - 52%
Chatherine Deneuve (actress) - 50%
Shania Twain (singer) - 50%
Lavrenty Beria (Stalin's henchman) - 48%
Norman Mailer (author) - 48%
Jeff Goldblum
People are always telling me I look like Jeff Goldblum, but Jeff Goldblum never came up in my results. Perhaps, I thought, it is my manner that reminds people of Jeff Goldblum, rather than my appearance. I decided to run a photo of Jeff Goldblum through the system to see if they matched him with any of the same celebrities to whom I was matched. It returned only one common match, Keanu "Ted" Reeves, at a low percentage.
The surprise? Jeff Goldblum did not match Jeff Goldblum. His top match was Tom Cruise!
Tom Cruise
I decided to run a photo of Tom Cruise through. The application had the exact same photo on file, and so I got a 100% match.
In summary, I will not be mistaken for any famous people anytime soon.
It's interesting, but based on these results—none of my matches were listed twice—I think most of my matches had more to do with the angle of the pose than with any particular facial features. I suppose that's a tricky thing for a compter program to overcome, but I think that's essential if they want this to be more useful than just a parlor trick.
