I logged into Facebook last night to check my messages and found that one of my friends had posted something called My Celebrity Lookalikes from the My Heritage website. The website claims to use state-of-the-art facial recognition technology and compares a close-up photo you upload to a database full of celebrity images. Intrigued, I tried uploading a succession of pictures. Each picture returned a bunch of celebrity images--male and female--along with a percentage rating of the closeness of the match.
This so-called facial recognition technology isn't perfect; I found that depending on the picture and the angle, I got matches that varied wildly. The first time I tried it, I ended up being matched to Alison Tisdale and Jamie Lee Curtis, possibly because of my pronounced jawline in that photo. The second time, I uploaded a picture from my grad photo session and was matched to a slew of dark-haired Asian starlets, including Zhang Ziyi and Shu Qi. Perhaps most disturbing of all is the fact that the website scans your image against celebs of both genders; according to the number of guys that popped up in my results, I have a somewhat androgynous face. Most matches hovered around 65-80%, so I'm stumped as to how my friend can bear a 96% resemblance to Angelina Jolie!
Anyway, if you're looking for something to kill time with, definitely check this website out because it's worth a giggle. Here are a couple of my attempts.
http://www.myheritage.com/collage
http://www.myheritage.com/collage
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