Real-time Facial Recognition With Face.com's KLIK App

Everyone's favorite facial-recognition company, Face.com, has released a new facial recognition app for iPhones that automatically identifies your friends by name--before or after you take their photo.

KLIK must be configured to your Facebook account to work; it references the real-time image with all your friends' images to identity the friend in front of you. Usually, KLIK is sharp enough to ID each friend even before you snap a photo. Then, their name floats above them in your camera's viewfinder (like Tom above).

If KLIK doesn't recognize a given friend, you can opt to tag him or her, giving the software a chance to learn more faces and identify additional friends. The app has several photo filters (think Instagram) that let you customize your photos. It also includes a feed of nearby photos, friends' photos and sharing options. I was glad to hear that your photos aren't automatically posted to Facebook--which seems like something Face.com would do.

To me, the app seems fun and pretty sleek. I wouldn't be surprised if my friends and I all end up downloading it the next time we're at the bar.

Interested in trying KLIK for yourself? Download it here.

Photo Hack Day Yields Awesome Facial Rec Applications

Developers at last month's Photo Hack Day in New York City presented some amazing facial recognition technology, all built from publicly-available APIs, like Face.com's.

Check out the video above, which introduces Facialytics, a service that blends the best of facial recognition and computer analytics to track a large group of people's emotions over time. With just an infrared camera and facial rec technology, Facialytics analyzes a crowd's reactions to, say, a commercial, movie, concert or presentation. In the right industries, this information will be invaluable.

HoneyBadger is another interesting use of facial rec that created some buzz--both good and bad--at Photo Hack Day. The app uses your laptop's camera and facial recognition technology to recognize when someone is at your computer. If it determines that the user is not the laptop's registered owner, it'll send you an alert via text message. Meanwhile (and here's the contentious part), it'll run the user's image against your friend's Facebook photos in an attempt to identity him or her.

Although HoneyBadger only searches your friend's photos, it could go a step further and search all public Facebook photos. And that, in my opinion, is where things would get creepy.

Google Weighs Facial Recognition Plans

Executives at Google have found themselves in an interesting dilemma. While feeling pressure to launch new facial recognition technology to keep up with the market, new Internet privacy concerns are making some higher-ups uneasy about pushing the privacy envelope.

Google already includes facial recognition in its Picasa photo-sharing service, enabling users to tag people in their photos and then find them in other albums. However, the company was hesitant to use facial rec in its recently-launched Goggles app, which identifies an object by analyzing a smartphone photo of it. Concerns were raised that if Goggles did include facial rec, people’s privacy could be easily compromised.

Now, in the wake of Facebook’s privacy backlash, Web 2.0 users seem more concerned than ever about the potential dangers of facial recognition. Meanwhile, Google has faced its own privacy problems this year, as it undergoes investigations for accidentally recording data from unsecured WiFi connections. And who can forget its much-criticized launch of Buzz, the social networking site that may have exposed users’ private information without their consent.

From the Financial Times:

Eric Schmidt, chief executive, said a series of public disputes over privacy issues had caused the management team to review its procedures and the launch of new technologies. According to Google executives, facial recognition is one of the key topics of internal debate.

Facial recognition is a good example … anything we did in that area would be highly, highly planned, discussed and reviewed,” Schmidt said. “When you go through these things, you review your management procedures.”

While Google pontificates on privacy concerns, companies like Face.com are making headway in the facial rec/social media realm. The Financial Times reported that Schmidt didn’t rule out an eventual facial rec product, however.