Facial Recognition for Dogs and Cats

If you’ve ever tried photographing a dog or cat, you probably know how difficult it can be to take a sharp photo while it’s looking at you. My friend’s dog (a pomeranian) is actually scared of my camera, and shies away when the DSLR is pointed at him.

FujiFilm’s new Finepix Z700 aims to make pet photographs easier by being the first camera to offer facial recognition for dogs and cats, and can automatically snap photographs for you when the pet is looking at the camera.

However, the technology is still pretty young, and has a ways to go before it rivals human facial recognition, which itself is ocassionally buggy.

For example, the camera has difficulty detecting pets that don’t stay still, and though it can detect up to 10 pet faces at once, it can’t handle a mix of dogs and cats. The subjects need to be either all dogs, or all cats.

Furthermore, some breeds of dogs (and maybe cats too?) can have pretty strange looking faces. The camera can’t handle those. FujiFilm even has a dedicated webpage listing the breeds of dogs and cats that the feature can usually detect, and includes sample images:

As you can see, you need to have a fairly… generic looking dog or cat if you want to detect its face.

Pets that cannot be easily detected include those that have: dark patches around the eyes or nose, too dark of a color, wrinkled/long/thin faces, or hair covering the eyes.

We’re guessing something like this will stump the camera:

Perhaps we should have titled this post, “Facial Recognition for Cute and Generic Looking Dogs and Cats”.


Image credit: Castle Combe by Karen Roe

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