KeyLemon Blog

FaceOnIt, facial recognition for your iPhone

The use of face recognition in a mobile device has slowly started to interest big firms. Apple, investing Polar Rose, rumors about Google and then its Goggles service proved them right. What about this technology? Is it really adapted to the Smartphones/Tablet platform?

The year of the Tablet PC

Perhaps this is not the year that face recognition will peak on the mobile. Industry experts are labeling 2011 as the year of the Tablet. So, many of us we think that 2012 will be the year of for face recognition.

This makes sense. For example, in 2012, the integration of a front camera on a smartphone will be more widely utilized. Visiophony interests more people every day ever since Apple released FaceTime and this motivates other manufacturers to excel. Also, the quality of the video cameras installed will be better and better.

A good implementation

It’s always hard for a big company like Apple, Google or even Microsoft to propose an application that uses a new technology. To suggest it in the first place implies that the user will have an intuitive, simple, functioning and regularly used experience.

We can easily imagine the domain for using this technology. The automatic tagging of our own image gallery with our contacts, the security of our data, etc. Some companies have already started by proposing some concepts like:

• Security
• Video games
• Automatic recognition with Social Network
• etc…

The MOBIO project

The Institute of Research Idiap enabled us to find an answer to these questions by permitting us to test this technology.

A few weeks ago we talked about the MOBIO project, developed at the Institute of Research Idiap. In short, it was a project to experiment the use the facial recognition on mobile platforms.

At the conclusion of the project, the application FaceOnIt has now appeared. FaceOnIt is powered by a facial recognition Software Development Kit (SDK).
It’s available for free on the iTunes Store, and compatible with iPhones, iPod Touch and iPad last generation.