Even after publicly declaring on several occasions that it had no interest in facial recognition, Google has gone out and bought itself a –yes – facial recognition software company by the name of PittPatt.
Pittsburgh based PittPatt, which emerged from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, has all the algorithms needed to identify your little punum, and is even able to track the motion of faces on video.
“At Google, computer vision technology is already at the core of many existing products (such as Image Search, YouTube, Picasa, and Goggles), so it’s a natural fit to join Google and bring the benefits of our research and technology to a wider audience,” said a notice on the PittPatt site.
“We will continue to tap the potential of computer vision in applications that range from simple photo organization to complex video and mobile applications,” the statement went on.
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Google said it thought PittPatt’s “research and technology can benefit our users in many ways,” though whether those ways invade people’s privacy or not remains to be seen.
It certainly is an about face for the firm whose Chairman, Eric Schmidt, said back in May his firm would be “unlikely to employ facial recognition programs,” owing to privacy concerns.
Google wouldn’t be the first to integrate facial recognition into mobile apps, however. Qualcomm funded Viewdle has been tinkering with facial recognition for quite some time. Which company ultimately gets the most face time, remains to be seen.