Image classification and information retrieval over wireless digital networks and the internet

• US 8,311,294 B2
• Filed: 09/08/2009
• Issued: 11/13/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 09/08/2009
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Motorola Solutions, Inc.
• Original Assignee: FaceDouble Incorporated
• Inventors: Myers, Charles A., Shah, Alex
• Primary Examiner(s): Patel, Kanjibhai
• Application Number:
  US12/555,789
• Publication Number:
  US 20110058743A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,162 Days
• Field of Search: 382115-118, 382/181, 382/218, 382/305, 382/312, 455/410, 707/104.1, 707/607, 707/705, 348/295, 348/316
• US Class Current: 382/118
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/5838 using colour
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 20/52 Surveillance or monitoring of activities, e.g. for recognising suspicious objects recognising microscopic objects G06V20/69
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 40/16 Human faces, e.g. facial parts, sketches or expressions
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 40/168 Feature extraction; Face representation
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 40/169 Holistic features and representations, i.e. based on the facial image taken as a whole
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 40/171 Local features and components; Facial parts eye characteristics G06V40/18; Occluding parts, e.g. glasses; Geometrical relationships
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 40/172 Classification, e.g. identification
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 40/173 face re-identification, e.g. recognising unknown faces across different face tracks
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 40/179 metadata assisted face recognition
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99948 Application of database or data structure, e.g. distributed, multimedia, or image

Abstract

A method and system for matching an unknown facial image of an individual with an image of a celebrity 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. Once classified, the matching person'"'"'s name, image and associated meta-data is sent back to the user. The method and system uses human perception techniques to weight the feature vectors.

Claims

1. A method for weighting a plurality of feature vectors for facial images, the method comprising:

determining at a server the quality of a plurality of matched facial images to generate a preferred plurality of matched facial images, each of the plurality of matched facial images comprising a source image and a database image, the source image comprising a plurality of feature vectors and the database image comprising a plurality of feature vectors;

analyzing at the server the preferred plurality of match facial images to determine which of the plurality of feature vectors are most closely related to human perception to generate a plurality of human perception feature vectors; and

weighting at the server each of the plurality of human perception feature vectors based on the analysis.

2. A method for matching images online, the method comprising:

receiving a digital facial image from a user at an image classification server;

identifying a pair of eyes of the digital facial image;

comparing the digital facial image to a preselected set of database images or an alternative image;

selecting a matching imaging from the preselected set of database images or the alternative image to create a matched images;

displaying the matched images for voting to collect information on human perception;

analyzing at the server the voting to determine if the matched images are a match based on human perception; and

transmitting the voting results from the image classification server to the user.