Facebook Develops DeepFace, A Face Recognition Technology That Closely Replicates 'Human-Level Performance'

Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is trying to close the gap between humans and computers in facial recognition as the company says it has developed a technology that recognizes whether two different images are displaying the same face -- an ability that comes very close to replicating human ability to make the distinction. The new technology, called DeepFace, is claimed to be 97.25 percent accurate, reducing the margin of error with current state-of-the-art technology by more than 25 percent. According to Facebook, DeepFace is closely approaching human-level performance, which has scored 97.5 percent in the same standardized test. "In modern face recognition, the conventional pipeline consists of four stages: detect align represent classify," Facebook said in a research paper, released last week. "We revisit both the alignment step and the representation step by employing explicit 3D face modeling in order to apply a piecewise affine transformation, and derive a face representation from a nine-layer deep neural network."