Super Bowl Winners With Help From Face++
Face++ is a real time face recognition API (and our new favorite toy). You may ask “What does that have to do with the Super Bowl?” Let us show you!
“Face++ is a new vision platform built by Megvii Inc. aiming at providing compact, powerful, and cross-platform vision service. Face++ uses the cutting-edge technology of computer vision and data mining to provide 3 core vision services (Detection, Recognition and Analysis). With the service and huge database of celebrity from Face++, the developers can apply the face technology into their own websites, mobile Apps and smart TVs, increasing incredible user experience.”
Sounds pretty cool right? Well it is! Face++ is used for Face Detection/Tracking, Facial Point Detection, Smile Analysis, Gender/Race/Age Analysis, 1:1 Face Verification, 1:N Face Recognition, as well as Large-scale face search. So this is pretty much all the cool stuff they do on the criminal investigation television shows, except for the fact that you can do these amazing things from your own computer!
We took this mega-interesting API and ran the team rosters of the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots for more raw data that we love. With the powerful brains behind Midphase’s amazing web hosting infrastructure we assimilated this data to form a highly educated hypothesis as to the winner of Super Bowl XLIX.
Face++ recognizes traits within each photo scanned, but we were only interested in two:
- Gender, aka ‘manliness’
- Smile, aka ‘happiness’
Each trait is tagged with a confidence rating 0 – 100% determining how confident Face++ is on its previous allegations.
For example: After scanning a photo with Face++ results we were presented with the results:
“attribute”: {
“age”: {
“range”: 7,
“value”: 33
Face++ estimated that the face scanned was 33 years old +/- 7 years.
“gender”: {
“confidence”: 99.94,
“value”: “Male”
Face++ estimated that the face was male with a 99.94% confidence, or very ‘manly’.
“smiling”: {
“value”: 2.71368
Face++ estimated that the the face was smiling with a 2.71368% confidence, so not smiling at all.
Try your own Face++ demo here.
We chose these two traits based on these facts:
- Football is a ‘manly’ sport*, therefore it stands to reason that the players with a higher confidence rating of ‘manliness’ could be expected to excel at the sport.
*This statement is not of my own personal opinion, women rock at football too – check out the IWFL for proof!
02. Football is an aggressive sport, therefore it stands to reason that players with lower smile/happiness ratings could be seen as higher levels of aggression and therefore could be expected to excel at the sport.
After running each player’s photo through the API, we received these results from Face++:
Seattle Seahawks
– Average Manliness: 98.95% confidence rating
– Average Happiness: 39.23% confidence rating
New England Patriots
– Average Manliness: 93.82% confidence rating
– Average Happiness: 56.91% confidence rating
Analysis from lead expert Cameron Bird: “We can see clearly that the Seahawks are the more visibly masculine of the two teams and, stemming from the ancient need to hunt and protect one’s family group, the male tends to be the larger, more physical gender. This ‘should’ make them better at football, a sport largely concerned with player size.”
The Seattle Seahawks not only had a higher than average manliness confidence rating but a lower smile/happiness rating. According to our research, the Seattle Seahawks are our predicted winners according to Face++ facial recognition software.
Disclaimer: This is in no way seen to be science, rather the results of geeks with enormous love of data and all things data related.
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