Facebook announces new 97% accurate facial recognition tech

The social network announced that its analysts have developed Deepface, a new facial recognition technology that is almost as accurate as human perception.

The new program, created by 4 artificial intelligence analysts, is accurate around 97% of the time, or almost as often as human perception, which is estimated to be around 97.5% accurate.

Developed using a dataset of 4 million images of 4,000 faces, Deepface corrects the angle of each face analysed before comparing it to a 3D model of the average face. The program then assigns a numerical description that allows the face to be compared to other images.

It remains to be seen how Facebook will put the newly-developed technology to use. For the time being, the social network has not announced when and how Deepface could become available to its 1.2 billion users.