14 DAY TRIAL // Google has acquired PittPatt, a company specializing in facial recognition, according to an announcement on the company's site. There are no clear indications for what Google plans to do with the technology, but the company already employs facial recognition in some of its products.
"Joining Google is the next thrilling step in a journey that began with research at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in the 1990s and continued with the launching of Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (PittPatt) in 2004," the announcement on PittPatt's website reads.
PittPatt has developed several technologies related to facial recognition. Its algorithms can detect human faces in photos and can track human movement in videos.
"At Google, computer vision technology is already at the core of many existing products (such as Image Search, YouTube, Picasa, and Goggles), so it's a natural fit to join Google and bring the benefits of our research and technology to a wider audience," PittPatt explained.
"We will continue to tap the potential of computer vision in applications that range from simple photo organization to complex video and mobile applications," it added.
While Google already has some facial recognition technology, which it uses in Picasa for example, the company has stood away from deploying it too widely and has said privacy issues make this type of technology tricky to use.
Google has actually built facial recognition for Goggles, its visual search app for mobile phones, but has not deployed the technology fearing it could be misused.
Still, Google does have quite a growing number of experts and technology relating to image and pattern recognition and other image analysis tools. It recently launched a new feature in Image Search which enables users to find copies or more information about images they can upload or select from the web.