Face-Detection Program Ranks Senators with the Biggest Smiles [VIDEO]


Adopting Face.com‘s face-detection algorithm, a new program called Congressmiles analyzes the smiles of a group of people. His guinea pigs for the project: U.S. senators.

Dan Nguyen, a developer at ProPublica, created the program by incorporating the Sunlight Congress API, the Congress API for photos of individual House and Senate members, plus Face.com’s API that provided the face detection element of the new program.

Face.com utilizes facial recognition technology in its API services and social tagging applications including the Photo Finder Facebook Application. Face.com program codes are available for developers to apply detection and recognition technology in new ways.

“I chose senators because there is only 100 of them, they’re fairly well-known and it’s always fun to poke fun at them,” Nguyen told Mashable. “The day after I made my post, a fellow Canadian journalist did the same for his members of parliament. I could easily change my code to do the House of Representatives.”

Though it was built just in the midst of political frenzy resulting from GOP presidential debates, the application shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Nguyen says he made the program to demonstrate the process of simple coding applications.

“However, I do think it would be interesting to run a bunch of past official campaign photos from both losers and winners, and test for that famous claim that square-jawed, smiling candidates also enjoy better election results,” he said, among other possible variables.

As for the results of this Congressmiles study, watch the video above.

Considering there is a Facebook Fan page for Mitt Romney’s hair and the comments about Ron Paul’s old age at Thursday’s CNN Republication Debate in Jacksonville, a politician’s smile can say a lot to potential voters.

Tell us in the comments how you could use face-detection technology.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Vince Alongi

More About: face detection, face.com, Politics, Video

For more Dev & Design coverage:


This entry was posted in face detection, face.com, politics, video and tagged , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.