Esther Schindler of IT World recently discussed a number of new technologies that have a definite cool factor in addition to plenty of real world applications. She focuses on facial recognition technology: “The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology used clever geek bait to attract me to its booth: video clips from The Big Bang Theory. Formally, the project ‘focuses on the exploration of new methods in computer vision to enable detection and analysis of faces and people in both images and video’… For instance, touching the screen can bring up the actor’s record on imdb.com (destroying any argument with your spouse that begins, ‘Really, that’s the same actor who was in an episode of Firefly!’), or enabling better video search results (such as, ‘Show me all the scenes with both Sheldon and Penny’).”

She continues, “The researchers explained that the software is currently about 80% accurate, and it takes an hour or two to process each TV episode. And that’s with it paying attention only to the main characters; if you spot a walk-on character in the background of a bar scene, you can’t look up whether that really is the same actor you saw in another show… Still: This research has possibilities – far beyond TV (though I know people who’d pay good money for a more-accurate version, right this second). Anything that lets us improve video search is a godsend for semantic indexing of multimedia data, to begin with. And as the research material suggests, identifying users lets software automatically select tailored, individual settings (such as recommending TV programs).”

Read more here. You may also want to check out a panel at the upcoming SemTechBiz Conference in San Francisco, Beyond the Blob: Semantic Video’s Coming of Age.

Image: Courtesy KIT