Facebook has announced it will be adopting a facial recognition technology with a new program that could potentially identify faces from untagged images with utmost accuracy.

Facebook acquired Face.com in 2012 specializing in facial recognition technology. In the previous week, Facebook published a research paper showcasing the invested work in facial recognition technology.

Yaniv Taigman, co-founder of Face.com, who has also co-authored the research paper, introduced "DeepFace," a technology that can match two images of the same face with astounding precision.

How Does 'DeepFace' Work?

All Facebook users might have noticed that the social networking giant can "suggest" friends to tag when a picture is uploaded in their account.

Currently, it can recognize friends by analyzing the distance between an individual's eyes and nose in both profile pictures and already tagged images, according to RT.com.

DeepFace compares 3D facial features and creates a colorless model to determine specific characterizations, Mashable reported.

To explain further, DeepFace uses software to correct the angle of a face in an image, and then compares that to a 3D model of an average face. It then uses simulations to find a numerical equivalent of the face. If there are enough similarities, Facebook will be able to figure out if two faces are identical.

This technology uses a "nine-layer deep neural network," according to reports.

"This deep network necessitates more than 120 million parameters utilizing locally connected layers without weight sharing, rather than the standard convolutional layers."

Also, they trained their software on the largest collection of images (facial), which accounts for 4 million facial images of 4,000 users.

Researchers at Facebook claimed "humans who look at two faces can identify if they are the same person with a 97.53 percent accuracy." But "DeepFace" program will be able to identify with 97.25 percent accuracy."

Has DeepFace Hit Facebook Users Already?

DeepFace is still in the research stage so Facebook users need not worry at this point. It is only a matter of time before the social networking giant tags every user who has an account with Facebook.

With teenagers deserting Facebook for other cool options like Snapchat and WhatsApp: Will this new technology help Facebook gain users (or) drain further?

Will this be an open invitation for NSA to snoop around? What do you think about this new technology?

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