With the 2016 Academy Awards now less than a week away, Microsoft is offering users a way to see if they look like a past or present Oscar nominee. The company's Bing division has launched the CelebsLike.me site, which uses Microsoft's Project Oxford facial recognition tools that have been used in the past for sites like How-Old.net and TwinsOrNot.net.
Microsoft says that if you upload a picture of yourself to the site, it will use those tools to find a web photo of a Oscar nominated actor, actress or director that most closely resembles the photo. It will also display three more non-Oscar nominated celebrities that also look like the photo. It adds:
These matches are based on facial structure—think jawline, eye spacing and nose shape—and not things such as hair length or color. That means your matches will share the same facial structure, but perhaps include a mix of gender and races.
Microsoft also described how the facial recognition tools work:
"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. The engine, in communicating with Bing databases and using state of the art deep learning, functions as an end-to-end simulation of human behavior in understanding and learning. It continues to build and provide comprehensive knowledge on the appearance of a huge number of celebrity images, including those nominated for Oscars."
Source: Microsoft
