Phrenology is considered pseudoscience today, but it was actually a vast improvement over that era’s prevailing views of personality.

Physiognomy, the study of the systematic correspondence of psychological characteristics to facial features or body structure.

Phrenology explores the connection between the dimensions of the skull and certain personality characteristics, while physiognomy addresses an implicit relationship between a person’s outward appearance and their personality.

He says facial features can reveal personality traits because they reflect both aspects that people are born with (nature), and aspects that they develop throughout their lives (nurture). The ratio of facial length to width is used to determine natural confidence levels.

Faces that we deem attractive tend to be symmetrical, they find. Attractive faces also are average. In a symmetrical face, the left and right sides look like each other. But our eyes read faces with similar proportions on both sides as symmetrical.

No clear evidence indicates physiognomy works, but the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning for facial recognition has brought a revival of interest, and some studies that suggest that facial appearances do “contain a kernel of truth” about a person’s personality.

Applied social cognition research has found that people readily agree regarding whether a given face appears criminal [3], [7], and have well defined stereotypes concerning what criminals look like [1], [2], [3], [4]–[5]. Angry faces were rated as the most criminal, followed by neutral and happy faces.

Giambattista della Porta

AncientFaces is a free online vintage photograph sharing service which aims to build a “portrait of our past” by offering members the opportunity to share and view vintage photographs of their ancestors.

Physiognomy, broadly conceived, was the belief that a person’s appearance could tell us something about their personal characteristics.

FaceReader is the most robust automated system for the recognition of a number of specific properties in facial images, including the six basic or universal expressions: happy, sad, angry, surprised, scared, and disgusted. Additionally, FaceReader can recognize a ‘neutral’ state and analyze ‘contempt’.

Popular recognition algorithms include principal component analysis using eigenfaces, linear discriminant analysis, elastic bunch graph matching using the Fisherface algorithm, the hidden Markov model, the multilinear subspace learning using tensor representation, and the neuronal motivated dynamic link matching.

By 2023, China will be the single biggest player in the global facial recognition market.

Doing so is banned under California law regulating how police can use facial recognition technology. LAPD Chief Michel Moore said the system is much narrower than facial recognition apps built by some private companies, like Clearview AI, which scan billions of photos from the internet.

“Facial recognition risks being weaponized by law enforcement against marginalized communities around the world. From New Delhi to New York, this invasive technology turns our identities against us and undermines human rights,” said Matt Mahmoudi, AI and Human Rights Researcher at Amnesty International.

Law enforcement agencies and some companies use it to identify suspects and victims by matching photos and video with databases like driver’s license records. But civil liberties groups say facial recognition contributes to privacy erosion, reinforces bias against black people and is prone to misuse.

Use of facial recognition technology goes well beyond clocking hourly workers in and out. Some employers scan faces to monitor worker productivity. Others use the technology for security.

Improper Data Storage and Sharing. Privacy concerns with facial recognition also have to do with improper data storage that expose face ID credentials to potential security threats. Many organizations still host their face recognition data in local servers.

Facial recognition data is personal and sensitive, making privacy an important aspect of data management for companies to address. ➢ Data Security. Commercial use of facial recognition technology raises many of the same security concerns applicable to sensitive personal information generally.

However, facial recognition could potentially allow recruiters to find out more about you than you’d realise. Tools like reverse image searches can provide stalkers with more data about their victims. Criminals who have collected enough personal information on you could commit identity fraud.

A facial recognition system uses biometrics to map facial features from a photograph or video. It compares the information with a database of known faces to find a match. That’s because facial recognition has all kinds of commercial applications. It can be used for everything from surveillance to marketing.

In a typical law enforcement use, an agency would run a photograph of a person of interest through a facial recognition system, which can search enormous databases in a matter of seconds. The system typically returns a score indicating how similar the image presented is to one or more of the images in the database.