Profiling faces is a more common task than you would think. Facial recognition technology is embedded into many applications, from Facebook’s photo tagging, to the Xbox Kinect sensor. All of these technologies work using facial recognition systems, by profiling faces by the layout of their features.An algorithm may analyze the relative position, size, and/or shape of the eyes, nose, cheekbones, and jaw. These features are then used to search for other images with matching features within a database of “face-prints”. Our system attempts to provide a visualization of a simplified face-print to allow for visual differentiation between faces, rather than using an algorithm to compare face-prints.

Anaface is an online application that rates your face based on a number of ratios and metrics, calculated from user-provided input. Our goal was to basically extend this system to provide visual feedback, as it currently only provides text-based feedback on the layout of facial features. The GUI we built for input was inspired by the Anaface GUI and operates in much the same way. Our visualizations are a more effective extension of the output generated by Anaface.

Bonsor, K. "How Facial Recognition Systems Work" . Site Source Retrieved 2013-05-19