Facial Recognition Trained to Spot Family Resemblances

Facial recognition can do more than identify you and determine your age and gender. Now, it can also recognize resemblances between you and your relatives.

An article in New Scientist suggests the software could be used to reunite lost family members over the Internet – not to mention by Facebook to identify members’ relationships to their friends.

The software was created by researchers at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Using images of public figures and their children, they trained the software to recognize parents and their offspring. The technology can now predict family resemblances with a 68 percent success rate, "simply" by examining each pixel in every photo.

Although family-recognition programs have been attempted in the past, they couldn’t account for differences in post, expression or lighting. The new Nanyang system does away with these limitations by focusing on groups of pixels, not entire facial characteristics.