Last week, Bing launched their Guide to the Academy Awards, and to help celebrate the launch of this guide, they added a new feature to the mix with its CelebsLike.me – a site that finds your look-alike celebrity.
This feature allows users to upload a photo of themselves to the site, or share one that is already online, giving Bing the ability to match it to an Oscar nominated actor, actress or director, as well as include three additional celebrity matches not involved in the Oscars.
In the announcement, it was noted that matches are based on facial structure versus details like hair length or color. “That means your matches will share the same facial structure, but perhaps include a mix of gender and races,” writes Bing program manager Ravi Yada.
There was a brief explanation that Bing included that told of how its CelebLike.me site works, such as relying on the perceptual intelligence capabilities of Cortana Analytics, as well as the Bing Satori knowledge graph and image graph.
The Bing team built one of the largest vision-recognition engines in the world, leveraging face and vision APIs that are part of the perceptual intelligence capabilities of Cortana Analytics. This recognition engine recognizes celebrity faces, like Tom Hanks and Keira Knightley, for example, in web images on a large scale with extremely high accuracy. The engine then links these entities to both the Bing Satori knowledge graph, where we have information about the entity, and Image Graph, where we have knowledge based on visual features and web presence of the image.
Bing says that their recognition engine is able to outperform humans with certain vision tasks, and is always improving.
Bing directed readers to its “Challenge of Recognizing One Million Celebrities in the Real World”