Digital Image Search System And Method

• US 20080317298A1
• Filed: 08/27/2008
• Published: 12/25/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 09/28/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Motorola Solutions, Inc.
• Original Assignee: FaceDouble Incorporated
• Inventors: Shah, Alex, Myers, Charles A.
• Granted Patent: US 7,599,527 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 382/118
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 10/98 Detection or correction of errors, e.g. by rescanning the pattern or by human intervention; Evaluation of the quality of the acquired patterns
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 40/168 Feature extraction; Face representation

Abstract

A method and system for matching an unknown facial image of an individual with an image of an unknown twin using facial recognition techniques and human perception is disclosed herein. The invention provides a internet hosted system to find, compare, contrast and identify similar characteristics among two or more individuals using a digital camera, cellular telephone camera, wireless device for the purpose of returning information regarding similar faces to the user The system features classification of unknown facial images from a variety of internet accessible sources, including mobile phones, wireless camera-enabled devices, images obtained from digital cameras or scanners that are uploaded from PCs, third-party applications and databases. The method and system uses human perception techniques to weight the feature vectors.

Claims

1. A method for matching an unknown image of a first individual with an image of another individual that is a twin in appearance to the first individual, the method comprising:

acquiring an unknown facial image of a first individual;

transmitting the unknown facial image from a sender over a network to a server;

analyzing the facial image at the server to determine if the unknown facial image is acceptable;

processing the unknown facial image to create a processed image;

comparing the processed image to a plurality of database processed images;

matching the processed image to a database processed image of the plurality of database processed images to create matched twin images, wherein the database processed image is a facial image of another individual that is a twin I appearance to the first individual;

determining a perception value of the matched images;

sorting matches based on predicted human perception; and

transmitting the best matched images and the perception value to the sender over the network.

2. The method according to claim 1 wherein the processed image is processed as a primary feature vector and the plurality of database processed images is a plurality of database feature vectors, and wherein comparing the processed image to a plurality of database processed images comprises comparing the primary feature vector to each of the plurality of database feature vectors.

3. The method according to claim 2 wherein matching the processed image to a database processed image of the plurality of database processed images to create matched twin images comprises selecting a database feature vector with a value that is most similar to the value of the primary feature vector.

4. The method according to claim 2 wherein comparing the processed image to a plurality of database processed images further comprises applying a statistical model based on human perception as determined by user'"'"'s votes of previous third party matched images.

5. The method according to claim 2 wherein the primary feature vector and each of the plurality of database feature vectors are based on a plurality of factors comprising facial expression, hair style, hair color, facial pose, eye color, texture of the face, color of the face and facial hair.

6. The method according to claim 1 wherein transmitting the unknown facial image from a sender to a server comprises transmitting the unknown facial image to a male server site or a female server site.

7. The method according to claim 1 wherein the unknown facial image is acquired by a digital camera and transmitted from a computer over the internet to the server, or the unknown facial image is acquired by a camera of a mobile telephone and transmitted from the mobile telephone over a wireless network to the server.

8. The method according to claim 1 wherein the unknown facial image is a JPEG image transmitted as a MMS.

9. The method according to claim 8 wherein the matched images and perception value is transmitted from the server over a wireless network to the mobile telephone.

10. The method according to claim 1 wherein the matched twin images and perception value are transmitted to a sender'"'"'s web page on a web site.

11. The method according to claim 1 wherein analyzing the unknown facial image at the server comprises determining if a plurality of facial image factors are acceptable, the plurality of facial image factors comprising the lack of a facial image, the lack of eyes, uneven lighting, the brightness of the facial image, pose angle of the facial image, relative size of the facial image and pixel strength of the facial image.

12. A method for matching images, the method comprising:

wirelessly transmitting a digital facial image from a mobile communication device over a wireless network to an image classification server;

processing the digital facial image at the image classification server to create a primary feature vector for the digital facial image;

comparing the primary feature vector to a plurality of database feature vectors, each of the plurality of database feature vectors corresponding to a database processed image;

obtaining matched twin images from the primary feature vector and database feature vectors;

sorting the matched twin images based on predicted human perception;

transmitting the best matched twin images to the mobile communication device.

13. A system for matching an unknown facial image of a first individual with an image of another individual that is a twin in appearance to the first individual, the system comprising:

a mobile communication device comprising means for generating a digital facial image of an individual and means for wireless transmitting the digital facial image;

an image classification server for receiving the digital facial image from the mobile communication device, the image classification server comprising

means for analyzing the digital facial image,

means for processing the digital facial image to generate a processed image,

means for comparing the processed image to a plurality of database processed images to create matches,

means for sorting the matches based on a predicted human perception to determine the best matched image;

means for transmitting the matched images and the perception value to the mobile communication device; and

a wireless network for transmissions between the mobile communication device and the image classification server.

14. The system according to claim 13 further comprising means for weighting the voting to provide the predicted human perception.

15. The system according to claim 13 further comprising means for weighting the feature vector.

16. The system according to claim 14 wherein the vote weighting means comprises a support vector machine to input a source feature vector and a celebrity feature vector to predict a human perception vote.

17. The system according to claim 13 further comprising means for determining which feature vectors are relevant to the determination of the predicted human perception.

18. A method of matching an unknown facial image of a first individual with an image of another individual that is a twin in appearance to the first individual, the method comprising:

acquiring an unknown facial image of a first individual;

transmitting the unknown facial image from a sender over a network to a server;

analyzing the facial image at the server to determine if the unknown facial image is acceptable;

processing the unknown facial image to create a processed image;

comparing the processed image to a plurality of database processed images;

matching the processed image to a database processed image of the plurality of database processed images to create matched images, wherein the database processed image is a facial image of another individual from the another individual'"'"'s web page of a publicly available website, the web page containing personal information of the individual and a uniform resource locator for the web page;

transmitting the database processed image, the personal information of the individual and the uniform resource locator for the web page to the sender over the network.

19. The method according to claim 18 wherein the publicly available website is www.MySpace.com or www.facebook.com.

20. The method according to claim 18 wherein the personal information of the another individual comprises the another individual'"'"'s name, address, telephone number, email address, age, school, friends, favorite entertainments, favorite foods, and the like.