PittPatt will search the web and identify your image in 60 seconds
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon university – in partnership with Google - have developed a Windows application that can scour the internet, comparing images found online with a submitted picture, and identify you within 60 seconds.
The image analysis technology doesn’t actually operate in under a minute, Infosecurity notes, but harnesses the existing search algorithms that Google uses for its image search. It’s similar algorithms that allow Google to spider-search all aspects of the web on a 24x7 basis, allowing your text searches to return a result in a matter of a few seconds.
Not unexpectedly, the imminent arrival of PittPatt in Google’s search arsenal has gone down badly with industry privacy watchers. According to the Dailytech newswire, the software and back-office systems have potentially devastating effects as far as personal privacy is concerned. The newswire says that the software calls the PittPatt interface with a picture it has captured, with PittPatt hopping online and comparing that picture to millions of images in Facebook and in Google Inc.'s (GOOG) image search, using advanced facial recognition technology.
