#1453: FaceBacks

Think about all the portrait photos on the web (including all those billions of facebook poses). Rather than concentrate on the forced smiles or the pouting, today’s invention is a software tool which can draw conclusions about a webpage based on the backgrounds of the facial images.

Detecting portraits is pretty straightforward. Once this is achieved, a texture and colour analysis should be enough to determine whether the portraits are:

  • taken all at the same time, which may indicate eg a completely fresh board of directors
  • taken using that strange, brown, cloudy background that is almost only used by corporate officers in behemoth companies
  • seemingly made in a library. A sure sign of lawyers, since they still think sitting in front of hand-tooled vellum makes them look smart
  • a random mixture of colour and greyscale shots: indicative of a complete lack of taste (you are probably on the website of a research group in Physics)
  • easily identifiable as having photobooth backgrounds -which suggests a particularly low-rent outfit.
  • This automated approach provides an extra search filter, allowing one to rule out of consideration a large number of unattractive organisations.

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