Much like fingerprints, our faces are unique – no two exactly alike. As human beings, we see the differences, but what can a computer see? In the movie “Minority Report,” cameras in a shopping mall recognize Tom Cruise’s character and ads speak directly to him. While that’s fiction, new technology at Carnegie Mellon University is not.

Inside the CyLab Biometrics Center at CMU, is a drone that’s programmed to seek out faces. It wants to take your picture. And in the next room, is something they’re working on for the Department of Defense. The camera the drone uses can see someone’s eye form a distance and then the system checks to see if that person has been entered into its database – or is a possible security risk.

But the center’s director Mario Savvides showed us something remarkable. They started by taking a picture of KDKA’s David Highfield and adding it to their computer. “First step, we analyze the face to extract 79 landmarks,” said Savvides. It mapped out his face and then determined that he’s male and Caucasian.

It’s similar to the fictional mapping seen on many TV shows, where detectives compare faces. But at CMU, from a single picture of Highfield looking straight forward, “We are able to show if we can generate a 3-D model of your face from that single 2-D photo,” Savvides said.

The computer is able to figure out what he looks like form a variety of different angles. […]