Google has acquired a patent to improve facial recognition through the use of data collected on social and other sources. Here’s how the search engine will be able to identify people.
Among the visitors of your Facebook profile there is Google: the Mountain View company has in fact acquired a patent called Facial recognition with the help of social networks.
The well-known search engine already has a high capacity for recognition applied to images: for a long time, a search can be carried out starting from a photo to obtain visually similar results. Just go to the Images tab and instead of typing the topic that interests us, select the camera icon and paste a URL or upload the photo from our computer.
This type of research, however, is not able to analyze the faces better and in most cases will return only photos that are identical to the original appearing on a Facebook profile or similar images for laying and background, but of people other than that sought.
The result that Google wants to achieve, however, seems much more accurate.
Google | Facial recognition on social networks
The new system designed by Google would like an improvement of artificial intelligence that would come to use not only visual clues, but also some data collected from social networks, apps and calendar.
This information could be related to age, place of residence, work and a range of other data available online.
Also the person performing the research will be taken into consideration. For example, if we did a search from a friend’s image, Google could use the connections between us and that person, such as friendship on Facebook or the city where we live, to find the right results without making a mistake.
This technology could result in significant improvements and help us in image research even when the information we are looking for is hard to reach. Another of the possible uses, also mentioned in the license, concerns the possibility to automatically share a group photo with all the people portrayed, using the system for identification without having to select friends manually.
Of course there are also concerns mainly because of the amount of information that Google could get and the possibility that they pass into the hands of someone else.
One could present a problem concerning the privacy of users, in recent years has become a matter of focus, and it is not surprising that the way of doing the great G has already driven many people to use alternative search engines or browsers that do not track users.
For now, a reassurance comes precisely from the text of the patent that notes that in some cases people may have the opportunity to decide whether to show their identity and images on online searches.