The time has come that you may no longer be just a familiar face in a photo from a friend’s party or a home video. A facial recognition technology developed by a small Pittsburgh-based company PittPatt (Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition) can easily find and recognize your face in a static image or even a dynamic video stream. The technology, the company and all its patents have just been acquired by Google as a next step in its quest for visual search and image processing.
PittPatt was founded in 2004 and started with object recognition research which later evolved into an advanced Face Recognition Software Development Kit (PittPatt SDK). This kit is a powerful tool that can process and sort thousands of photos and video sequences tracking and searching for faces and determining if faces are the same person.
Using facial recognition technology in web services and social networks brings about many privacy protection issues, so it is not yet clear how and when Google is going to utilize this function. But a far more important question is whether the very notion of personal life will be around much longer.
Prepared with the use of materials from http://www.pittpatt.com/