Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Whose face is this?

A while ago I was on Facebook and saw this on my sidebar:

I stared at the image for a while.  Was this some sort of new Facebook game?  The face was vaguely familiar.  Was it a celebrity of some sort?  But what was with the distortion?  After a while it came to me:


It was the face of Saint Michael, from the stained glass windows of St. Mary's Church.

Well, that was pretty weird.  Was Facebook going through the pictures I've posted to my account, running through them with a face-finding algorithm to try to get me to tag the faces of non-users and then invite them to join Facebook?  Probably.  Good luck with the century-old stained glass images, though.

A few days later I saw this:

Ummm.  OK.  That's not a face.  That's part of a face.  What is the face-recognition algorithm seeing here?  One eye, and then what?  Is the fur under my dog Haley's ear being read as a second eye?  Is the ruff of white hair at her neck being seen as a mouth?  Oh, and she's been dead for five years.  Once again, good luck with using her to generate any advertising revenue.

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