Show a photo, website will tell your age

NEW YORK, USA: Web users have become used to the idea that most of what they read online–whether it's Facebook comments or personal e-mails–is scanned by software that tries to serve up relevant ads. But soon online advertising companies may start serving up ads based on the age of people in photos that you're viewing on a page.

That's thanks to startup Face.com, which already offers a face-recognition service that websites or apps can use to count the number of faces in a photo, tell their gender, or match them to known individuals. Starting this week, that service will also guess the age of the faces it spots in photos and ad networks and other Web and mobile companies already have plans to use it.

"You send us a photo with a face in it, and it'll send back an estimate of their age," says Gil Hersch, CEO and cofounder of Face.com, which is based in Tel Aviv, Israel.

To use the service, programmers have their software send photos to Face.com over the Internet and receive back the results of the analysis. Face.com returns an upper and lower range on the age of the face, a specific estimate, and a confidence score. A demonstration site shows the information that Face.com calculates from a photo.

Face.com's ability to guess age comes from training software on a collection of hundreds of thousands of photos that had been labeled by people who made their own attempts to judge the age of people in them.

Face.com's software matches human guesses of the age of a face in a photo about 90 percent of the time, but the company has not compared its accuracy against the true age of people.

Certain types of photograph are challenging for Face.com's age detection. "Women who are stars tend to look younger than they really are," says Hersch, "but this is consistent with how people judge age, because we relied on them to average the truth when we trained the system."

Face.com's technology may never be as good at determining age as a person, but Hersch says that in many cases, just knowing the approximate age is useful enough. "Marketers, 90 percent of them are only into the range anyway," says Hersch.

(Source: technologyreview.com)