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Who's Your Daddy? Ucf Students Program Computer to Find Out


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	  Enrique Ortiz and Afshin Dehfghan demonstrate the computer tool that matched images of Catherine Zeta Jones with her children.

A new facial recognition program is designed to quickly match pictures of children with their biological parents.

Credit: UCF Today

University of Central Florida (UCF) researchers are developing a facial recognition program designed to rapidly match pictures of children with their biological parents and identify photos of missing children as they age.

"As this tool is developed I could see it being used to identify long-time missing children as they mature," says UCF professor Ross Wolf.

Although facial recognition technology is already heavily used by law enforcement, it has not been developed to the point where it can identify the same characteristics in photos over time. Wolf says the new technology could possess this capability.

Graduate student Afshin Dehghan and a team from UCF's Center for Research in Computer Vision launched the project with more than 10,000 online images of well-known people and their children.

The program first converts the photos into a checkerboard of patches and extracts tiny snapshots of the most significant facial parts. The program then compares all the photos feature by feature and sorts them by the most probable match.

During testing, the researchers found the program did a better job of matching features of parents and their children than random chance, and it also outperformed existing software for identifying relatives through photos by 3 to 10 percent.

From UCF Today
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Abstracts Copyright © 2014 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA


 

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