Facebook’s facial recognition technology doesn’t even need your face

Facebook has been working on a new experimental face recognition system that it capable of identifying people without seeing their whole face. The team behind this new face recognition project at Facebook pulled 40,000 public photos from Flickr, some people had their face partially hidden whilst others had their full face shown in the pictures. Their experimental face recognition software was able to identify 83 percent of the people from the photos, the company says that other things are used to identify people when their face is hidden. Facebook’s Yann LeCun, who is head of artificial intelligence at the company had the following to say about how their software works. “There are a lot of cues we use. People have characteristic aspects, even if you look at them from the back,” LeCun says. “For example, you can recognise Mark Zuckerberg very easily, because he always wears a gray T-shirt.” Facebook could possibly use the technology in some of their apps in the future, like the new Moments app which is designed to share photos with your friends.