5 fascinating search engines that search for faces

A face is not as unique and ageless as a fingerprint, but it is easily captured and searched for. Facial recognition , combined with data from surveillance cameras or online profiles, is a powerful tool for finding people and tracking their every step. On the entertaining end of the spectrum, a face search can reveal your online look-alikes (celebrities) or your age.

Here is three facial recognition search engines that can give you a thrill. Let’s see what they reveal about you or your friends.

READ ALSO: Top 10 facial recognition apps for Android and iOS

Did you know that you could search google by pictures ? Rather than a keyword, you can use an image to find similar images.

Click the camera icon to search by image. You can paste image url or upload an image and Google will find similar images.

Additionally, you can do a Google search for faces just by adding a small piece of code.

When you access Google Images Search , enter your query, press Enter, then add ” & imgtype = face “(Without quotes of course), either at the end of the search URL, or just before another string starting with & . This will further improve your facial related search results.

Below is a before and after example that you can try for yourself:

Google also offers its facial recognition in Google Photos.

2. PicTriev : facial recognition

PicTriev takes it a step further by actually searching for similar faces. Unfortunately, the functionality is limited to look-alike celebrities.

What you do is add the URL or upload a photo in JPG or JPEG format, with a size of no more than 200KB, and the search engine will return the matching celebrity images found online.

It works much better if you are looking for a celebrity image.

PicTriev also allows you to compare the similarity of two faces or estimate whether the photos of two faces are the same person. Click on the icon counter at the top right, upload two photos, select the similarity or the identity and let PicTriev do its calculations.

Before adding photos, be sure to follow the formatting instructions for the best results.

3. TinEye : Reverse image search

TinEye’s reverse image search works almost like Google. You can upload an image or paste a URL and search for it. TinEye no longer supports search operators, which makes it both simpler and more basic.

Unlike Google, TinEye links directly to the pages where it found the images and ignores similar images.

4. Pimeyes : Face search

Similar to Google’s Reverse Face Search, PimEyes uses images and face recognition to find similar faces on over 10 million websites. Demos using faces of celebrities like Angelina Jolie or Zac Efron look promising.

For example, you can search for Jennifer Aniston’s face using four different photos at a time. PimEyes will find the original photos, as well as other photos of Aniston.

Oddly enough, although the app finds the original images used for research, the similarity is only noted at around 70%. Shouldn’t that be closer to 100%? Or does the algorithm take into account the resolution, size, brightness and other digital alternations of the image?

Note that PimEyes has a 24 hour deal that unlocks access to its premium search results. But given my questionable results, I wouldn’t recommend paying for this service.

5. Betaface : facial recognition demo

Betaface offers a search for facial recognition similar to PicTriev’s photo ID. You can upload an image or send image url and the face search engine will isolate and characterize all the faces it can identify in the photo.

Then you can compare faces (with other images you uploaded), search for celebrities or search in Wikipedia for each face recognized. The results will appear in the table of recognition matches facial.

This tool is useful for uploading and comparing photos in bulk. In addition to ranking faces based on 101 pro facial points, you can also enable extensive geometric and chromatic measurements, as well as a “best face only” feature. Both of these slow down processing, but will increase the quality of your matches.

Bonus: How-Old.net : How old are you?

This tool uses a photo to guess the age of the subject. Microsoft created How-Old.net to showcase its machine learning APIs. What is more fascinating is what Microsoft learned from this experience. Apparently, wearing a hat can make you look younger, while glasses will make you look older, and losing your beard can shave some years as well.

SEE ALSO: This site contains 100,000 images of AI faces free of rights generated

What does your face reveal?

Facial recognition and search tools have a range of useful applications. Not only can they help police identify suspects from security camera footage. They can also help professional photographers or media companies index visual material and create large, searchable archives. Additionally, facial recognition can replace passwords and keys.

But every tool has a dark side. Not so long ago the Facezam a viral marketing scam highlighted what facial recognition could do for your privacy. The creators of the app claimed that within seconds, you can find anyone’s Facebook profile by uploading a photo of their face. Essentially, FindFace for Facebook.

Although such an application violates Facebook’s privacy policies, Facebook itself uses facial recognition search to identify people in photos (unless you have disabled the function ). And arguably, Facebook’s face search engine is better than the FBI’s identification tool. Why? Because you purposely stuffed Facebook’s database with a wide variety of photos, all of which helped its artificial intelligence improve faster than the FBI could have imagined. And it’s all legal. You can’t always hide your face, but you can protect your privacy online .