Normally used for security purposes, face and image recognition technologies are making their way into other, more entertaining, fields. One service, kaocheki, lets people send a digital photo of themselves via cell phone to find out which celebrity they most resemble.
Using a face recognition engine developed by Oki Electric Industry Co., kaocheki is free of charge and simple to use. Within a few seconds, a photo sent to [email protected] (for men) or [email protected] (for women) will result in a list of your top three celebrity matches — complete with percentage.
Taking full advantage of the high-resolution camera phones that are everywhere in Japan, two-year-old mobile content provider J-Magic Inc. launched the service on a trial basis in late April. By early June, more than 22 million users had tried the service.