Google has said in the past that Google Goggles could do face recognition but won’t because, well, it’s a bit icky. Eric Schmidt, Google Executive Chairman and frequent ponderer of the “creepy”, reiterated that point earlier this week saying the idea of Google creating a facial recognition database was “very concerning” and that Google just wouldn’t do it.
However, it seems that not everyone at Google agrees. A patent application focused on recognising faces on social networks popped up in February and, yesterday, an even more intriguing document was released by the US Patent and Trademark Office – a facial recognition patent focused on celebrities!
Entitled “Automatically Mining Person Models of Celebrities for Visual Search Applications” was submitted in August last year and describes “methods and systems of automated identification of celebrity face images”. Essentially, Google’s attempting to patent an algorithm-powered celebrity detector.
If the system was released as a working product, it could be a paparazzo’s dream, allowing you to find not just photos tagged with the name of particular celebrity but pretty much any photo online featuring them. The Google patent application reveals that it’s already established a database of 1000 celebrities including President Obama, Sarah Palin and Prince Harry.
So regardless of what Google says publically and its stated future plans, it’s definitely stacking up the patents just in case the public gets a little less creeped out by face recognition.
Out TBC | £TBC | Google/USPTO (via The Atlantic Wire)
