It looks like Google’s 2006 acquisition of Neven Vision, a company specializing in facial recognition software, is finally starting to pay off. Google Blogoscoped, a blog dedicated to everything related to Google, got a tip from a Google engineer that Google had secretly added some facial recognition abilities to its image search this week.
The feature remains unofficial and unannounced, but you can add a small query string to the end of your Google Image search URL to see the facial recognition software in action.
For example, do a normal Google image search for “Starbuck Battlestar” and your image results should produce images from the American SciFi TV show Battlestar Galactica. Then try adding “&imgtype=face” to the end of the URL. Your new search results will only contain photos of people and tight shots of their faces. Cool right?
Last August, Google Picasa product manager Adrian Graham
had this to say about Google’s acquisition of Neven Vision in the official Google blog:
“Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects.”
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No longer are our magnificent Monday night ‘Heroes’ going to be confined to merely mortal NBC TV (and SciFi Channel reruns). Our favorite Heroes and villains are coming to DVD this August with tons of bonus features.
The 7-disc set, available on DVD and HD DVD on August 28, 2007, will include the never-before-aired 73-minute premiere episode and over 50 deleted scenes.
The Heroes Season 1 DVD set is priced at $59.98 and is available for preorder on Amazon.com for $38.99 until July 24, 2007.
Here are some of the Heroes Season 1 DVD extras:
- Unaired Pilot: The Tim Kring cut with audio commentary — A full 73 uninterrupted minutes of the original, unaired, extended pilot episode, as Heroes’ creator Tim Kring first envisioned it, with a character never seen.
- The Making of “Heroesâ€: From concept to pop culture phenomenon, a behind-the-scenes look at the hottest new series on television.
- Special Effects: The secrets behind the eye-popping visuals that give the Heroes their amazing powers.
- The Stunts: A backstage look at the show’s hair-raising stunts.
- Mind Reader: Matt Parkman’s mind reading abilities reveal your inner Hero with a series of simple tests.
- Profile of Artist Tim Sale: A look at the Eisner Award-winning comic book artist (Spiderman, Batman, Daredevil) behind much of the Manga-influenced artwork used in the show.
- The Score: Go behind the scenes with Wendy Melvin and Lisa Coleman (of Prince’s The Revolution) as they create their ASCAP Award-winning musical score.
- Extra Scenes: 50 deleted and extended scenes.
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