A look at the Third Place Developer Challenge winner, Photo Face Match

Facial recognition software has been around for some years now and has become very sophisticated. It has been used by law enforcement for the serious business of finding criminals and for the less serious business of tagging family members and friends in the Google program Picasa. Some online genealogical database programs have facial recognition abilities such as MyHeritage.com's celebrity matches.

A new entry into the genealogy community has extended the reach of facial recognition software, PhotoFaceMatch.com. They were the Third-place winner in the recent #RootsTech 2014, Developer's Challenge. Here is a selection from their website explaining what they are attempting to do:

Facial detection and recognition are becoming significant tools in a variety of applications in today's hi-tech world, from homeland security, law enforcement, commercial security, and social media. PhotoFaceMatch is an initiative to apply facial analytics to the world of geneaology.

Using a technology that may be described as “facial arithmetic” we look forward to helping you identify people in old family photographs and manage your albums in a way never before possible.

The twist here is that they are extending facial recognition to people at different ages in their lives. This company does not come into genealogy from a main interest in genealogy, this is primarily a commercial face recognition company that recognizes that there is a possible niche in genealogy. The developer company is described as follows:

Eclipse Identity Recognition Corporation (EclipseIR) incorporates advanced technology to identify individuals from live and stored video streams. In addition to genealogy applications such as PhotoFaceMatch, EclipseIR brings significant impact to government, law enforcement, public safety, health care, commercial and private security, as well as entertainment and social media.

It does not look like an application can be downloaded as yet, so we will have to see what develops.