Being in the facial recognition space we see a lot of news come through every week. We decided to try and compile a list of some of the best and most interesting news for our customers sprinkled in with what we are working on as well.
Our Favorite Story of the Week
Feature or Flaw in Facebook's DeepFace engine?
The Verge has an interesting article on Facebook's DeepFace algorithm thinking that an old picture of a user's mother was him. As we have discussed before this is likely not the cause of anything in the facial recognition engine at all, but the fact that Facebook users tend to tag images incorrectly.
For example, I may tag my daughter's image with my wife's name so she sees the image. Link
More Facial Recognition News
Facial emotion detection debunked?
New research from Northwestern University suggests that when not prompted the ability to tell people's emotions based on a picture of their facial expression may not be valid. This may have strong implications for computerized tracking and analysis of emotion through face detection. Link
Nanny Cams get Face Recognition
A new "smart nanny cam" was released that can recognize family versus intruders according to Wired magazine. Link
Twins research
Researchers once again took advantage of a large gathering of twins at "Twins Day" in Twinsburh, Ohio. Twins were analyzed for voice, iris, fingerprint and face differences. Watch this space for more details when their research is published. Link
Kairos Update
New features
We promised new features and new features you shall have.
We are now performing image processing on all images coming inbound to Kairos. In the past developers have had issues when their images were rotated incorrectly using the camera's EXIF tags. We will now sense this condition and correct your image seamlessly. This will also fix some corrupt images as well, enabling them to be processed without any additional effort.
Our detector by default is tuned to find faces that take up a minimum of 1:8 of the picture. Sometimes you have have a need to find smaller faces, or for increased speed set the detector to find larger faces. We have added a parameter called minHeadScale which can now be used to set this value. The parameter accepts a value between .015 (1:64 scale) and .5 (1:2 scale) and by default is set at .125 (1:8 scale).
Finally, we have modified our API to enable you to enroll and recognize multiple faces automatically (detect was always capable of handing multiple faces). By default, the API will enroll all faces in a picture into the subject_id you specify. If you do not wish to use this behavior, you can turn it off by specifying "multiple_faces":"false".
More details available at developer.kairos.com/docs
Do you have a feature you would like to see added? Please contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and we will try to get it on the roadmap.
Feedback on the newsletter or anything Kairos or facial recognition?
Contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or hit us up on Twitter @lovekairos
Cole Calistra - @kairoscto kairos.com