Saturday, December 31, 2005

Who do you look like?

At the MyHeritage website, you can upload a picture of yourself and match it to celebrities using crazy-ass face-matching technology. I got (in order from best match to worst) Joaquin Phoenix (their matched photo at right), Pierce Brosnan (wow, he's pretty), Gene Hackman (solid dude), Steven Soderbergh (doofy), and Howard Dean (YEAAAAAAH!).

Here's the really funny part... I did it twice, once with a sly smirk photo, in fact my profile photo at top right (results above) and once with stern, angry photo. The second time I got Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, Peter Ustinov and Leonard Cohen!

So it's not face recognition, it's expression recognition. Or else it just can't tell the difference. If the system can't decide if I'm Pierce Brosnan or Fidel Castro, something is rotten in Denmark. This is supposed to help me find family members? Yeah, I'm related to everybody with the same smirk.

WARNING: You have to register, so get your dump web address and fake name ready. But I thought it was worth it. The Fark thread on this is absolutely hilarious.

6 comments:

Kathy said...

The female possibilities I got are pretty flattering:

Amelie Nothomb

Tori Amos

Anni-Frid Lyngstad

But when you open it up to men as well I got some downright insulting matches. I think it gave me every man in the database who wears glasses. The best ones were Andrai Sakharov, Stan Lee (!?), and Desmond Tutu.

Yeah, me and Des. He's my uncle, you know. Heh.

Kathy said...

And Tom got:

Shimon Peres
Matt LeBlanc
Kofi Annan (hee)
Sebastien Loeb
Mick Jagger (whoo!)
Bill Murray
Carlos Santana

Funny stuff.

Kathy said...

Yes, I have decided to ownzor this comment thread. I just got around to reading the Fark comment thread. I am still wiping the tears away from my eyes from seeing that image of the Ha! Ha! guy with "I'm in love with an uptown girl" underneath it.

I might die.

Mkae said...

My highest was Benita Ferrero-Waldner. (No idea who she is but her face was roughly looking up in the same direction as mine.)

Next was Teddy Roosevelt, Greta Garbo(??), Segio Vieira de Mello, Marcello Mastroianni, Abdelaziz B outeflika, Alan Alda, and Ewan McGregor.

As with the Fark post, I'm not sure how I feel about this.

One funny note is that I accidentally uploaded a picture of my son first and it came up with Marilyn Monroe. I do know how I feel about that.

Jason said...

I got a 70% match with Leni Riefenstahl, which does look like a pretty close match for the pic I submitted.

Kindralas said...

I find it surprising, or perhaps not-so, that the best most of these people could think of to do with it is try to find pictures of celebrities that would come up with the exact same celebrity.

Personally, I'd go and try to find something like a plate of spaghetti and see what that came up with...