Sunday 5 September 2021

On facial recognition

Vélo-Quebec introduced something new this year with a photo section of the Tour de l'Île. It had employed a half-dozen or so photographers deployed along a section of street to take photographs of all the passing participants. All 30k+ of them are available here.  I knew about what time I had gone through the section so I "only" had about 4000 pictures to look through.

There was a feature that let you input a face so that facial recognition software could identify pictures in the set of a given individual. I didn't use it at first. Instead, I set about skimming through pictures looking for a figure in a red bénévélo-mechano t-shirt with a safety yellow helmet. It took quite some time, but I eventually found myself, as well as some of J.P. and family. Once I found one of myself, I clicked on my face to see if the facial recognition software really worked. It found three other shots of yours truly. It also generated a few false positives. All of them were of J.P.  I think the reason was that he was also wearing the same red t-shirt and also had a safety yellow helmet. In addition, he also has a short salt and pepper beard.



 

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