Here’s How YouTube Could Soon Be Spotting YOU in Videos

Despite facing criticism regarding its automatic facial recognition feature, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) evidently knows the importance of the element after acquiring specialist company Face.com only last month. Now Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is set to enter the same murky, but presumably advantageous, waters.

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The company has just been granted a patent for a technique that recognizes faces in videos using multiple frames to generate clusters of face representations. By knowing what a subject looks like from various angles, Google could then attach a name to a face whenever it shows up in a clip. The function has the potential of adding the Flickr-like option of tagging people in YouTube videos.

The application, titled ‘Method and system for automated annotation of persons in video content,’ was filed by Google in 2008. According to the application, one method of identifying faces in a video could be through selecting key face tracks from a video stream and clustering them together to create models, before correlating them to another facial track. An alternative way could be to include a face model database with pre-determined photographic entries and corresponding names, which can then be used by a face identifier module.

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