My Heritage Celebrity Face Recognition Program – Fun but Not Always Accurate

The website www.myheritage.com has a fun new toy they added called Celebrity Face Recognition, where you submit a photo and the program scans your face and tells you what celebrity you look like. This is a fun way to have a laugh with your friends but I have exposed the program for its flaw, but does it really scan your face. The answer is sort of, the algorithms seem to be more based on the angle of your face, then the actual features. I will explain more and show some examples of what I mean.

I have to admit that the program is a lot of fun, we all laughed about who we looked like and some of the girls actually brought up guys, one even was told she looked like Gene Simons. But this is the problem with the program, it is based on algorithms and they can’t be 100% accurate or even 50% accurate. From all of the photos I submitted every time I got a returned photo the only real similarities were hair color and the angel of our faces. I am guessing this is the main part of the algorithm.

So after multiple times of submitting my photos and getting people who didn’t look a thing like me, I decided to try some tests. I entered in some photos of well known celebrities, and it’s funny what I got. I have included screen shots of the results, it told me Brad Pitt looked like Brian Littrell I have no idea who that even is. Britney Spears looked like the French singer Ailzee, and Jenna Elfman looked like Daryl Hannah. These results are a little flaw if you ask me I mean Brad Pitt and Britney Spears are very famous if the program truly worked they would be recognized. I understand Jenna Elfman not being found but the others should have been.

I did read how the program works and it claims to work based on photos that have already been uploaded. And I did some other celebrities and they did return a photo of the person, the EXACT same photo. I am not surprised if the program can compare a photo to the exact same photo and go hey these are the same people. The program claims that after enough photos are uploaded by users then the program will work more effectively. The program also claims that one day when you enter your photo you will get pictures of people from your heritage. It claims to have that kind of power once enough photos are submitted; I doubt the statement, largely from my results of the celebs photos and mine.

This is a fun way to kill time but I seriously put no faith in the accuracy of the program. They need to do more work on it if they want it to be more accurate. Other than that I mean cant knock the program its fun, the only other thing I didn’t like about it was you have to register, and they claim no spam email but everyone says that. The website also has some other stuff to play with like the genealogy section where they have a couple of downloads for building a family tree, its free so go try it out. I didn’t want to download the program and waste my time with it but if you are into that kind of thing hey why not give it a shot, it’s free.

Overall this website is pretty fun, I like to show my friends who the program compares them to and have a good laugh, mainly because of inaccuracy or the celeb they look like is Dustin Diamond. The website also has some other features like a forum for posting about different genealogy stuff and finding old relatives or your heritage, hence the name of the website. You can also create a family site on Myheritage.com, the only problem is if you want to be able to have more than 15 members join your family site then you have to pay for it. The functionality of the free family page seems pretty limited as well, you can only do some much for free, and there are other family photo sites that are way better and free.

I only recommend this site to anyone wanting to use the face recognition thing to have a laugh. The other junk seems kind of lame and most of it costs money. I think the only other thing worthwhile on the site might be the free family tree maker; you can download it and find out for yourself. Well go check it out and see what celeb you look like.

Reference:

• www.myheritage.com