The application is of different ages. How old do you look - age determination from a photograph. Does the service determine the age reliably enough?
How-Old.net does not yet claim to be an accurate tool and exists rather as a free entertainment project. Visitors upload their photos and share the results to impress their friends, or to amuse them when the service goes wrong. But How-Old.net is based on the power of the Azure cloud platform, and its algorithms are constantly being improved.
The site is convenient to use both on a computer and on a mobile device. The developers have added several template photos of smiling people, on whose faces you can test the accuracy of age determination. You can also experiment with celebrity images or of course use your own. Microsoft says it does not store uploaded photos.
As for accuracy, in my case, out of ten test shots, the algorithm was able to correctly determine the age of only four of them. But the error of the service turned out to be small: the robot added or lost only 2-3 years.
Microsoft went beyond the site and added support for the technology behind How-Old.net into its own Sprinkles mobile app. This program can detect emotions and apply decorative elements such as hats and masks to users' faces. Alas, so far it is only available for iOS devices connected to the American App Store.
It should be noted that this is not the first implementation of such an idea. For example, cameras of some Xiaomi smartphones have long been able to determine the age and gender of a person from a photograph.
You can also find a huge number of apps with similar features on Google Play and the App Store. But I could not find worthy ones among them. They either do not determine the age from the photo at all, despite the description, or they do it very badly.
Recently I came across a very interesting service from Microsoft that allows determine the age of a person from a photograph (photo) online.
The developers have created the How-old service, which analyzes the face and, based on it, determines how old a person is. In most cases, the age is indicated very accurately. However, it should be understood that there can be no 100% certainty, since even a person sometimes finds it difficult to determine how old another person is. There are too many external factors preventing this. For example, for women - an abundance of cosmetics. For men - the presence or absence of a beard. Common facial features, fullness, lifestyle and, of course, the quality of the photo.
Let's go directly to the review of the service for determining the age of a person from a photo online and consider how to use it.
Determine the age of a person from a photograph - online service
How-old is very easy to use. Anything you need:
- Follow the link How-old.net;
- Click "Use your own photo";
- Select a photo on your computer.
You can also indulge in and upload photos of celebrities. For this, it is better to use the built-in search on the site.
Android applications for determining age by photo
Having rummaged in Google Play, I found several Android applications that use Microsoft's facial recognition technology.
So, you can install the program on your phone, smartphone or tablet.
Hello.
Not so long ago, a good friend of mine was sorting through old photographs: some of them were signed, and some were not. And he, without much hesitation, asked me: "But is it possible to determine the age of the person on it from the photo?" To be honest, I myself have never been interested in such a thing, but the question seemed interesting to me and I decided to search the network for some online services ...
Found! At least I found 2 services that do it well enough (one of them turns out to be brand new!). I think this topic may be of interest to quite a few readers of the blog, especially since the holiday is coming soon - May 9 (and probably many will sort out their family photos).
1) How-Old.net
Not so long ago, Microsoft decided to test a new algorithm for working with photos and launched this service (while in test mode). And I must say, the service began to rapidly gain popularity (especially in some countries).
The essence of the service is very simple: you upload a photo, and he will analyze it and within a couple of seconds will present you the result: next to the person's face his age will appear. An example in the photo below.
How Old Do I Look is a family photo. Age is determined quite accurately ...
Does the service determine the age reliably enough?
This is the first question that popped into my head. Because soon 70 years of victory in the Great Patriotic War - I could not help but take one of the main marshals of victory - Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov.
How Old Do I Look accurately determined the age of a person, an error of 1 year, and this is an error of about 1-2%!
I experimented with the service (I uploaded my photos, other people I know, characters from cartoons, etc.) and came to the following conclusions:
- Photo quality: the higher, the more accurately the age will be determined. Therefore, if you scan old photos - take them in the highest possible resolution.
- Colour. Color photography shows the best results: age is determined more accurately. Although, if the photo is black and white in good quality, then the service works quite well.
- Photos edited in Adobe Photoshop (and other editors) may not be detected correctly.
- Photos of cartoon characters (and other drawn characters) are not well processed: the service cannot determine age.
2) pictriev.com
I liked this site because, in addition to age, famous people are also shown here (although there are no Russians among them) who look like the uploaded photo. By the way, the service also determines the gender of a person from the photo and shows the result as a percentage. See example below.
An example of how the pictriev service works.
By the way, this service is more capricious to the quality of the photo: you only need high-quality photos, which clearly show the face (as in the example above). But you can find out which of the stars you look like!
How do they work? How to determine age from a photo (without services):
- Frontal wrinkles in humans usually become noticeable from the age of 20. At the age of 30, they are already well expressed (especially in people who do not take particular care of themselves). By the age of 50, wrinkles on the forehead become very pronounced.
- After 35 years, small folds appear in the corners of the mouth. At 50 they become very pronounced.
- Wrinkles under the eyes appear after 30 years.
- Glabellar wrinkles become noticeable at the age of 50-55.
- The nasolabial folds become pronounced at the age of 40-45, etc.
Using a wide range of observations, such services can quickly estimate age. By the way, there are already quite a lot of various observations and methods, especially since experts have been doing this for a long time, just before they did it without the help of any programs. In general, nothing tricky, in 5-10 years, I think the technology will be perfect and the error of determination will become even less. Technological progress does not stand still, however ...
That's all, all good May holidays!
03.05.2015 16182
The guys at Microsoft, it turns out, also have a sense of humor. They presented an Internet service that can or allegedly can determine the age of a person from his photo. It is called, literally "How many years"... It was created, however, not for fun, but to demonstrate the capabilities of the cloud platform. Azure.
The idea, I must say, is not at all new, a similar function has long been implemented, for example, in Xiaomi... Do you think Microsoft has set out to offer better algorithms for determining age from a photo? It is highly doubtful. So far, everything looks like a regular PR.
If what How-Old.net lacks is accuracy. The service database already contains several template photos of pretty smiling people whose age the robot determines more or less correctly, but try uploading ordinary photos, and you yourself will see that everything is not so simple.
How-Old.net is wrong not only with age, but also with gender. In some cases, the error can reach 30 years, in addition, in different photos the same people "in the opinion" of the service have different ages.
Not surprisingly, many are expressing their outrage. Still, it is somehow offensive if you, 20-25-year-olds, some kind of robot will add a couple of decades, and even forcibly change the gender.
Funny, you won’t say anything. Only now it seems very doubtful that Microsoft started all this for the sake of entertainment alone. While users from all over the world continue to have fun, the company's specialists receive more and more data to improve the algorithms of the detection system, which will be used in various technological fields in the future.
How old do you look? Old for your age? Or, on the contrary, so young that every time you buy a beer, you are asked to show your passport? Well, how old do you look ... for a computer that can only guess the age?
As an experiment, Microsoft's machine learning team has created a website that tries (with varying degrees of success) to guess the age of everyone on it from a photograph. The developers claim to have launched the service in the hopes that "maybe 50 users" will try it and get quick feedback; but in the first few hours, tens of thousands from all over the world were already pouring in on him. After a quick demonstration of the service at the BUILD conference in San Francisco, it became so popular that developers had problems with the servers.
To determine the age, you can upload any photo weighing up to 3 MB. And, of course, people begin to slip all kinds of nonsense into the robot. How old does your dog look like? But this strange spot on my wall that seems to resemble a face? 37? That's how it is!
Give him some photos with good lighting, and he will determine your age more or less correctly, give or take 1-2 years.
If the robot has determined your age completely wrong, do not worry - you are not alone. On his first attempt with a poorly lit photograph, he informed me that I was an 80-year-old man. Just shout, "What do you know about me, robot?" - and turn off the computer, everything will be fine. And yes, when determining the age of Bill Gates himself, the program misses by as much as 21 years, having aged him to the age of 81:
And it happens that she generally rips off the coils:
The software part of the service is constantly updated with new photos / data and is trained, so, in theory, it should improve over time.
And if the site does not load at all, do not worry, this also happens to it. Problems started to work with the site almost immediately after it began to gain popularity, which ... Microsoft may not really count on.