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
Why do we see faces everywhere?
One of our most primal instincts is facial recognition. There is an evolutionary reason we are programmed to see faces in a piece of toast or on a garbage can.
Image courtesy of @ScienceAllDayExcerpt:
"For instance, some people are much better at facial recognition. It turns out those people also excel at matching an adult face with the person's baby photo. These face experts are probably focusing their attention on details such as the distance between the eyes, nose and mouth, which stay roughly constant as a person grows"
More Facial Recognition News
Facial recognition in video analytics privacy concerns
At Kairos we firmly believe in the responsible use of facial recognition technology, full disclosure and protection of privacy. Vice has some in-depth reporting on Boston Police's use of IBM facial recognition on a mass scale at a public concert and raises some important questions. Link and an Alternatative view of the same event
Can facial recognition improve privacy?
There is thinking that automated facial recognition systems (taking humans out of the loop) may actually improve privacy verus an operator manually watching CCTV cameras. Link
Facial recognition used to find and capture a fugitive
A suspect on the run for 14 years was caught this week with the help of facial recognition techniques performed on passport photographs. Link
Fool proof privacy from facial recognition?
And if you are REALLY concerned about privacy of your face, there's always this gem. Link
Kairos Update
More new features for the Kairos API!
This week we have added two new parameters to the recognize and enroll methods (selector and symmetricFill). Previously on a detect call you were able to specify the level of face detection via the "selector" parameter. We have now added this method to our enroll and recognize calls. Why would you want to use this?
If you have an image where the face is turned a little to the side or tilted, setting the selector to "SETPOSE" will invoke Kairos' 2D --> 3D pose normalization engine. This will cause our engine to take your image, cast it on a 3D model, then rotate the head back to a neutral pose before enrolling or recognizing the image against your gallery. The symmetricFill in combination with SETPOSE will also render the parts of the face that were obscured on the original image and are now visible when the head is rotated back to center.
Go here for more details!
* Coming soon *
We have begun work on the next generation of Kairos' developer portal to better serve our customers. Any features that you want added, now is the time to ask.
As always, if you creating something cool or interesting with the Kairos API let us know and we will feature it in a future newsletter or on the website. No matter what, we would love to hear your feedback.
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