Unknown Civil War Faces are Being Identified Through Facial Recognition App

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/12/01/civil-war-photo-sleuth/

by arto • 8 years ago

108 47 8 years ago

mosselman5• 8 years ago

This is a very cool use of facial recognition. It could also be expanded to the complete history of photographs. So lets say trying to identify all people on all historical photographs. Wouldn't it be funny to see some of the same people pop up in different pictures around the world in events that were previously thought unrelated?

For privacy issues you'd want to limit this to periods in time that are far back enough for most people to have passed though. So I could imagine the Second World War to be a (somewhat arbitrary) limit for now.

This limit would eventually need to be expanded, because I wouldn't want my photographs to be examined like this in 70 years time.

laumars2• 8 years ago

This is a very cool use of facial recognition. It could also be expanded to the complete history of photographs. So lets say trying to identify all people on all historical photographs. Wouldn't it be funny to see some of the same people pop up in different pictures around the world in events that were previously thought unrelated?

My issue with that is faces aren't that unique, so you might get unrelated people identified as the same individual.

pbhjpbhj• 8 years ago

My issue with that was parsing your sentence structure ;o)

Isn't English so deliciously versatile.

Paraphrase: Faces aren't entirely unique. So, you could identify unrelated people as one person.

retSava• 8 years ago

And older pics are typically very grainy and blurry in general due to bad optics.

mosselman5• 8 years ago

Solving some of the quality issues would be interesting as well as studying the similarities of faces over time across the world. All in all it would be an interesting field of study for the hobbyist.

jnty2• 8 years ago

Given the likelihood of coincidences like that actually happening, you'd surely end up finding lots and lots of pairs of completely unrelated people that look remarkably similar, with no way of knowing if any of them are actually the same person.

toomuchtodo• 8 years ago

Could you not use metadata to create a confidence score? For example, if two people look similar but the dates of the photos are 100+ years apart, it’s unlikely they’re the same person.

This is how we find the time travelers :)

gwern2• 8 years ago

You have a lot of context/metadata like date taken (or at the worst, date acquired for a historical collection, giving a terminus ante quem) and can easily figure out the false positive rate. You may not know if two matches are the same person, but if one photo is dated to 1850-1860 and another photo is dated to 1931, you can safely infer that you have a false positive. Over a dataset of matches, that gives you an idea of how reliable each one.

Give people access to all the other clues like "insignia and inscription" and probably a lot of reliable identifications can be made, and the remainder flagged as 'possible but uncertain'.

glaslong• 8 years ago

A surprise benefit may be finding out which members of the human race are actually immortal and have been hiding it from the rest of society. /s

https://www.popdust.com/conspiracy-theory-thursday-keanu-ree...

GuiA• 8 years ago

This limit would eventually need to be expanded, because I wouldn't want my photographs to be examined like this in 70 years time.

Wait, why are you fine with doing it with other people’s 70 year old pictures, but you don’t want people 70 years from now to do it with your pictures?

(sorry if I am missing the sarcasm or some such)

Brockenstein• 8 years ago

Fortunately, when you're dead the living will do whatever they want and you're too dead to care.

mosselman5• 8 years ago

No sarcasm and I know it sounds dubious, but these are my thoughts:

- live expectancy has gone up, so in 70 years it will be more likely that I am still alive

- there are and will be a lot more photographs of me than of the average person in the 1940s, probably in the thousands of times more, so the impact on my privacy of studying all my photographs is far greater than it would be for the off picture of someone in the 40s. "Here he is, dressed up, at his wedding and 10 years earlier as a child" vs "Here is a map with all the places where mosselman was seen with a social graph of all the people he was ever seen with"

goodcanadian• 8 years ago

I have seen 100 years commonly used as a limit for census data and the like. It seems like a good number as any individuals are very unlikely to still be alive. (Those few that are would have been very young).

emiliobumachar• 8 years ago

Walk before we run, eh? AFAIK it's not even illegal in most of the world to identify us in yesterday's pictures, including for commercial purposes.

mosselman5• 8 years ago

'Illegal' and 'unethical' are two different things.

thanatropism• 8 years ago

Do you think there's no risk of harm (or at least inconvenience) for people who are suddenly discovered to be descendents from baddies of History?

I'm sure the Hitlers and Görings of this world changed their names in due time and took steps to insulate themselves and their offspring from their forefathers' bad rep, but what if it turns out your pop-pop was a guard at Auschwitz?

lostapathy2• 8 years ago

CIA invents this tech. Now it can be used to detect where they have meddled in the past. CIA buries this tech.

roadkillon101• 8 years ago

Well here's the actual link to the website https://www.civilwarphotosleuth.com/ What I'm curious about is what image recognition system they used to map the faces in the picture?

gwern2• 8 years ago

I thought it would be dlib since that's open-source and very easy to use, but it's actually the Microsoft face recognition API, according to their paper: "Photo Sleuth: Combining Collective Intelligence and Computer Vision to Identify Historical Portrait", Mohanty et al 2018 http://crowd.cs.vt.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/...

geephroh• 8 years ago

For anyone who wants to mess around with Face API, MS has a simple python implementation along with a sample desktop app here:

https://github.com/Microsoft/Cognitive-Face-Python

kartan• 8 years ago

I always though that this was gonna happen in the future. That someone 100 years from now will check zettabytes of videos, pictures, posts and is going to create complete profiles of everyone that has lived in our time.

Each time that you are in the background of a picture of an stranger. In the broad panoramic videos from sport stadiums. From fingerprinting you writing in all social media. From government documentation. From text of other people talking about you... all your digital traces to know who were you.

Now is happening with past pictures, even that there is no so much to mine compared with the present.

blazespin• 8 years ago

Yes, I can imagine with video they'll be able to do 3d reconstruction and even more accurate.

fencepost2• 8 years ago

The pictures that jumped to mind for this as a potential social issue aren't the Civil War ones - they're the Jim Crow era lynch mob pictures.

I'd say there's a huge difference between knowing that your (or someone else's) ancestors were terribly racist and knowing that they were involved in murders.

orblivion2• 8 years ago

How about your living relatives? This wasn't so long ago.

fencepost2• 8 years ago

Based on numbers from http://law2.umkc.edu/Faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynching... lynchings dropped off pretty rapidly after 1922, and were in the single digits annually by the mid 1930s. I suspect that there's also a drop in pictures of crowds and a social change that made them considered if not wrong at least "not something that people like US do."

There are very few people still alive who were adults when there were large numbers of lynchings happening in the US.

mirimir• 8 years ago

Yes, and there's no statute of limitation for murder.

Unknown Civil War Faces are Being Identified Through Facial Recognition App

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