Following its acquisition of Tel Aviv University Professor Lior Wolf‘s face.com, Facebook is developing DeepFace, with near-human level face recognition capabilities.
The technology processes images of faces in two steps. First it corrects the angle of a face so that the person in the picture faces forward, using a 3-D model of an “average” forward-looking face. Then a simulated neural network determines a numerical description of the reoriented face. If DeepFace comes up with similar enough descriptions from two different images, it decides they must show the same face.