Big Brother? Microsoft Unveils Technology To Recognize Faces In Video

You’ve probably all become familiar with face recognition software like Picasa, Windows Live Photo Gallery or even on Facebook.

Going one step further, on Sunday in Israel Microsoft unveiled OneVision, a technology that can track and identify anyone not just in photos, but in video.

Face recognition in video is an emerging technology that could have significant impact on user experience in fields such as television, gaming, and communication.

With OneVision, a television or an Xbox will be able to recognize people in your living room; your home videos could be annotated automatically and become searchable. TV viewers will also be able to get information about an actor, an athlete, or singer just by pointing to the person on the screen.

According to Innovation Labs, Microsoft’s R&D center in Israel, the technology “detects faces throughout the video and assigns a unique ID to all the sequences that feature the same person. Once tagged using a simple tagging tool, the face recognizer automatically identifies the tagged people at any point in the video, even if more than one person is in the frame, scenes have changed or people are not directly facing the camera.”

The algorithm used can identify faces on video, even if the face does not appear continuously to the camera as it notes other information such as background color, clothing etc.

The technology, along with several other new developments, was officially unvlealed the “Think Next” event Sunday, hosted by Microsoft in Herzliya, Israel.

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