Let’s face-off on Facebook

Who knows in future you may be able to emote to your friend’s FB posts in your own wide mouthed haha, open mouthed wow or a puckered brow frown? Going by the indications, things are inching towards such a reality. Facebook’s latest acquisition – of a face recognition company FacioMetrics — has become the talk of the tech town regarding the possibilities of inclusion of facial gesture controls on the app front.

Close on the heels of this merger, this startup’s apps have been withdrawn from the App Store and Play Store. ‘Intraface’, the facial image analysis app from Faciometrics could enable detection of seven facial emotions.

Started off “to respond to the increasing interest and demand for facial image analysis - with all kinds of applications including augmented/virtual reality, animation, audience reaction measurement, and others,” FacioMetrics further explains its association with Facebook thus: “Now, we’re taking a big step forward by joining the team at Facebook, where we’ll be able to advance our work at an incredible scale, reaching people from across the globe… We are looking forward to getting started at Facebook!”

FacioMetrics, a Carnegie Mellon University spinoff company, has kicked off research in bringing out cutting edge computer vision and machine learning algorithms for facial image analysis.

In October, Facebook, at the WSJDLive Conference, demonstrated incorporating famous artists’ styles on live video akin to Prisma-like filters. The acquisition has now come close on the heels of this update. But the challenges can’t that easily be brushed aside. As Venturebeat interprets the words of Facebook chief product officer Chris Cox, “Cox explained that real-time implementation was the hardest challenge the company faced, as the program functions at 24 frames per second.” Cox himself at the conference predicted that in the next five years, 70 per cent of internet traffic could be in video, the competition in live video front is only getting tougher. Let’s hope FacioMetrics be a trump card Facebook can boot in the big business.