FACE RECOGNITION: ALL LOOK SAME
May 29 Tuesday 2007

Last year, I ran a passport photo of myself through an online program that morphs your features into different ethnicities (the results of which you can view here). After posting it online, I received a couple of emails from people complaining it was racist. Wheras I don't completely agree with them, I'm sorry they were offended, although the website providing the service states: “Face Transformer is a fun toy only, and is not guaranteed fit for any purpose, implied or otherwise”.

Anyhow, I was introduced to another site recently that uses a genealogy engine to, “find the celebrity in you”. The first couple of photos I ran through came back with entirely female-celebrity matches. Slightly perturbed, I used a "just got out of bed" shot, in the hope that a more disheveled look would return male-celebrity results... and here’s what I got.

I actually have no idea who any of these "celebrities" are. In fact I do wonder whether all the program did was recognise that I have "East-Asian" features and then match me up to celebrites of the same race. I say this, because I don't think I resemble any of the matches at all. But then I appreciate that to some people (perhaps even the programmers), Asian's "all look same" - which brings me to this website that explores this very phenomenon and which unsurprisingly has also come under the kosh for being "racist".