What you'll learn
Nowadays, face recognition technology is ubiquitous. Meanwhile, it still sometimes feels like magic: It is not obvious how your smartphone can group your vacation snaps by the people on them. And how can it always select the group photo where everybody's eyes are open? When you’re on a video call, how can the software blur the background but not your face?
Let's begin with a brief overview of what this tutorial can teach you – and what it can't. The goal is to get you started with the tasks artificial intelligence can solve regarding the human face. We will look at some tangible use-cases and approach the topic from a practical, solution-oriented point of view. While following along, you can choose pictures from our example library or you can always select your own photos to get a personalized feeling what these technologies can achieve in practice.
It is also important to acknowledge that understanding what artificial intelligence actually does in a descriptive way is a quite hard problem that is subject of current research . Thus, you shouldn't expect to find answers to questions like Does face recognition measure the distance between your eyes? or Is mouth width or nose length more significant for identifying someone? Rather, we approach solutions to problems like I'm creating a photo gallery app. How to group the photos by people depicted? or I want to learn about face recognition. Where should I even get started?
Goals
- Provide a practical, solution-oriented point of view.
- Experience every step with examples.
- No prior knowledge of artificial intelligence required.
- You are able to use what is demonstrated in your own projects in practice after following along.
- Strengthen your intuition how computers work with faces and what they can and can not actually do with them.
Non-Goals
- Teach you how artificial intelligence achieves what it does in an interpretable way.
- Give you in-depth knowledge of the maths or science behind the technologies used.
- Teach you programming in general.