Google Buys PittPatt Facial Recognition

Google has purchased Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (as per the announcement made by pittpatt on their website), a technology that can be used to tab the photos and videos automatically.

In late March, Google denied plans for a dedicated facial-recognition app, although the company has said it could do so as far back as the launch of Google Goggles, which used object recognition to identify real-world objects.

"As we've said for more than a year, we will not add facial recognition to Goggles unless we have strong privacy protections in place," a spokesman told PCMag.com in March. "We're still working on them. We have nothing to announce at this time."

In June, Facebook turned on facial recongnition for U.S. accounts which is criticized by most of the security concerns and people as well, as it impairs the privacy of the concerning users.

PittPatt uses the same technology involving facial-recognition or smile-recognition used by some digital cameras, where the user's face is highlighted for focusing purposes.

According to documentation on the PittPatt Web site, the software looks for faces that are oriented on a plane facing the user, with an offset of a varying number of degrees. The software then automatically aligns the facial image to examine it for "landmarks," such as the width of the eyes, for example.

Do you think that google is going in the right direction by buying pittpatt for facial recognition? Or it will will put the users off as in the case of facebook? Nonetheless the facial war continues.