Want to date a Brad Pitt lookalike? There's an app for that!
by Richard Speigal
Geek Boy
Wednesday, 5th January 2011
Microsoft have registered a patent that could revolutionise the dating world by allowing you to search dating profiles for lookalikes.
The technology would allow users to perform image searches by comparing profile photos with an image of your choice.
Fancy Brad or Angelina but frustrated they're already taken? No problem - this software could sift the system for celebrity lookalikes (albeit without the A-list bank balance).
Or maybe you got dumped by the love of your life? No problem - find someone who looks just like them!
(There is a dark side: I lay bets that some weirdo will try uploading a photo of Lt. Worf within minutes of such a service launching. I can't wait to see the search results.)
For the tech minded, here's the bit in the patent we like:
"Online dating services generally use textual search criteria to identify potential matches. Users of the dating services typically create a profile, including a textual description and one or more pictures of the user. Users can search for potential dates by searching the textual description portion of the other users' profiles. Text searching works well to search based on non-visual attributes (such as age, gender, ethnicity, and location of the user), but often falls short when searching based on physical appearance, including facial features. This is troublesome since physical appearance is generally considered one of the most important search criteria among users of online dating services. Text searching also suffers from the fact that users may misrepresent themselves in text, providing inaccurate descriptions of themselves. It is difficult to correct for these inaccuracies, since this behavior can vary across individuals, ages, and cultures."
"Image-based searching has been used in other applications, such as facial-recognition, to ease the challenge of textually describing physical attributes. In such applications, images of faces are used as a query to search for other images of the same individual (i.e., the same person depicted in the image used as the query), but not other similar-looking individuals. Such applications typically do not allow users to search based on preferred facial features of the query image."
If this software gets off the ground it could create some real demand from dating websites. Presumably Microsoft will charge the dating industry a healthy slab for access to the technology.
Yes, yes we all know about the super high tech laser guided matching systems that some sites use... they are pretty cool. And we also know that beauty is only skin deep. But who wouldn't at least want to play with image searches as a tool for finding love?
I'm dusting off an old picture of Princess Leia from Star Wars right now (think Rachel, Ross, buns). Shallow? Maybe. Fun? Definitely!
topic tags: dating profiles, online dating, photos, technology
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about the author
Richard is the technical brains behind Dating Trail and prefers conversations in binary to real human contact. However he does know some strange things about dating; albeit not from experience (he's asexual like an amoeba) but rather from crunching numbers and peering into databases. He's nerdy but sometimes interesting.
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