The U.S. intelligence community is working to push facial recognition software forward, enabling it to better determine the identity of people through a variety of photos, video and other images.
Meet Janus – which “seeks to improve face recognition performance using representations developed from real-world video and images instead of from calibrated and constrained collections. During daily activities, people laugh, smile, frown, yawn and morph their faces into a broad variety of expressions. For each face, these expressions are formed from unique skeletal and musculature features that are similar through one’s lifetime. Janus representations will exploit the full morphological dynamics of the face to enable better matching and faster retrieval,” USA Today reports.
Documents released by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency show that the Janus program will start in April 2014 and run for four years. The agency hopes to “radically expand the range of conditions under which automated face recognition can establish identity.”