Facial recognition matches Mike Magee with Omar Sharif

FACIAL RECOGNITION software has made a lot of progress lately. However, we're still not convinced, after seeing a Flash demo matching user-submitted pictures with celebrities.

Web site My Heritage offers an interesting exercise: submit a picture of a person and the site's facial recognition software will let you build a Celebrity Collage of famous people that look like him -or her- indicating the match percentage. Or you can put things the other way around and claim you look like those celebrities, if you so prefer. The application is Flash based so disable your anti-Flash filters before visiting it.

After submitting this picture of INQ founder, Editor-in-Chief and spiritual leader Mike Magee, the software found several look-likes, with the highest match being for actor Omar Shariff, who has a 70% resemblance to our Ed according to the web site. Also included were musician Gheorghe Zamfir with a 68%, and shown without percentages, James Brolin, and Milton Friedman, among others.

The web site also allows you to embed the created collages into blogs and web pages. I suggest you use the option "Other" as entering your Blogger, MySpace or other third-party site user name and password into a third party site is not very secure, in my opinion.

While the results of a single picture could be debatable, when we submitted thi s picture of our Charlie Demerjian to the Facial Recognition web site, the results proved the less-than-ideal matching ability of this software.

According to the software our Charlie D. has a 70% match with actor Matthew Fox which will guarantee him success with the ladies I'm sure. But also, he has a 66 per cent of David Beckham and perhaps more shockingly, a 68 per cent of Barbara Hershey, we kid you not. See the results below:

Finally, I submitted a picture of myself, only to find this Artificial Intelligence marvel matched me as a 71% Carlos Santana, 62% Tony Danza, 56% Vin Diesel, 53% Ernest Hemingway and 47% Evander Holyfield, among others like former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardozo. I don't know what you think but I don't find myself resembling Carlos Santana.

Of course, your mileage might vary. And it's all about thresholds in the end. Probably the web site designers felt that if they had raised the thresholds too much, people would find no matching celebrities and that would have proven a disappointment. It's entertainment, after all. So if you want to find out what celebrities do don't look like you, have a try over here. µ