pictrieve

Ever wanted to know who your celebrity look-alike would be? Wonder no more – there’s a website that will tell you! By uploading a selfie, facial recognition technology will guess your age, gender, and celebrity doppelganger.

As the saying goes, you shouldn’t judge another person by their looks. But Pictriev.com thinks it can. Advertising itself as a face-search engine that measures the similarities between your face and those of famous people, the website uses facial-recognition technology to attempt to identify your age, potential celebrity doppelgangers, and even the “gender” of your facial features.

The site works by allowing the user to upload a photo or by pasting in a URL to an image, wherein it determines the percentage of masculinity or femininity of your facial features. It will also bring up international celebrity look-alikes from around the world – all in 14 languages.

For a bit of fun, I decided to check out the website for myself. First up, I uploaded a photo of myself that was taken in 2010. I consider it to be a decent photo, so much so that I use it for my LinkedIn profile. The results were surprising.

According to Pictriev, I am most certainly a female, but the website insists my facial features are 77-percent masculine, and 23-percent feminine. It’s fair to say the website wasn’t accurate in guessing my gender, but perhaps my facial features suggest otherwise? As for my age, it was a little bit off there too, adding on several years to my actual age at the time that photo was taken.

photo 3

The selection of celebrity look-alikes, a mix of male and female celebrities, were not familiar to me. Amongst them were a female Japanese politician, a female Japanese popstar, a Korean actress, a male Chinese comedian, and a male Korean soccer player. I think I am now suffering from identity issues.

I can assure you, I look nothing like any of these people.

Not satisfied with those results, I decided to try again with a photo taken in 2012. This time, results swung the other way and, thankfully, Pictriev.com decided I looked more feminine this time around. What a relief!

photo 2

Having used photos that are now three and five years old, I decided to try one last time with a more recent photo, to see if it was closer to guessing my age. I uploaded a photo that was taken in May this year.

I’m pleased to say that I was flattered with the results:

me 2015

Twenty-four years old – I’ll take that! As I’ve aged, it seems, I’ve become more feminine and younger in appearance!

Pictriev.com only works with real photos of faces that are reasonably close up and of decent quality. For fun, I tried using an image of Minnie Mouse, but it wasn’t able to detect a human face. I also experimented using a more distant, full-body shot of myself, and again it couldn’t recognise my face, because it was too far away. Similarly, don’t use photos which have a group of people in it. It will only identify one face, and randomly at that.

If the site supposedly searches celebrity look-alikes, I decided to try it with a photo of an actual celebrity. Here were the results for Lady Gaga:

gaga results

Surprisingly, it did not bring up Lady Gaga herself as one of the celebrity look-alikes.

Whilst we certainly can’t vouch for the accuracy of the site, it definitely helps in procrastinating from the important things in life and puts all those selfies to good use. Check it out for yourself at the link below!

Source: pictriev.com via Kinisoku
Screenshots: pictriev