Insight, a Google Glass App Lets People Recognize Friends By What They Wear

Google Glass is one of the happening things right now. According to a white paper published by Duke University, Insight is complementary to face recognition and exploits the intuition that colors of clothes, decorations, and even human motion patterns, can together make up a “ visual fingerprint”. When leveraged systematically, it may be feasible to recognize individuals with reasonable consistency, even when the face is not visible.

For example, let’s say Bob uses his phone and the phone’s camera extracts a visual fingerprint of him. This is now announced in the vicinity and received by all the smartphones. If Alice is wearing Google Glass and looking at the group of people including Bob, a picture from the Glass is processed and each individual visual fingerprint is computed. The received finger print of Bob via vicinity matches with the computed one and an arrow labelled “Bob” is now overlaid on the image segment that sent the visual fingerprint. Alice can view this on her Google Glass or smart phone.

Once we have the virtual badges associated to the people in the surroundings, the opportunities to use it will become endless. Tweets posted by them will appear on their heads and makes more collaboration between people possible.