How Google Arts and Culture's Face Match A.I. Actually Works

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Artificial intelligence is everywhere these days and humans can’t seem to decide whether to be creeped out by [how far it might go or laugh at how far it still has to go.

That’s part of what made the viral Google Arts and Culture feature allowing users to compare their faces with a work of art so fun. It played up our natural vanity, for sure, but it also gave us a chance to test out what AI is capable of.

If you want to know how our future robot overlords may work, here’s an intro to the facial recognition that powers the face match technology.

How Google Arts & Culture Facial Recognition Works

Facial recognition is a biometric identification system that examines the physical features of a face to try to distinguish one person from another.

Facial recognition detects a face in an image, creates a “faceprint” of unique characteristics, and then verifies and/or identifies it against existing information in a database.

It sounds like an easy process, but in fact, there is a lot of learning that the machine has to do first: after identifying faces in an image, it may have to reorient or resize it for a better reading — we’ve all been in cases where a selfie taken from too close looks distorted from reality.

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Then, once the AI has resized and reoriented the face, it creates a “faceprint”, a set of characteristics that uniquely identify one person’s face. This could include the distance between facial features, such as eyes, or shapes or sizes of noses.

Faceprints can then be compared with an individual photo or to databases of many images.

In the case of Google’s museum selfie feature, each selfie that is uploaded is compared with its database of over 70,000 works of art.

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