My Face, Digitally Recognized

A few days after Christmas I emailed some pictures of myself to a stranger I met online. The recipient wanted to see my face in each photo, preferably at different angles. I was also welcome to include shots featuring a "beard, glasses, etc." I chose four photos that I wasn't too embarrassed about, and hit send. A few days later, the facial recognition firm Animetrics—my pen pal—sent me several photos of their own. You can see one of them above. On the left is a photo I sent; on the right is that same image after Animetrics rendered it into 3D.

Today's surveillance video cameras can't capture a still image anywhere near as clean as the one you see above, which matters quite a bit in determining someone's identity. But a few years from now? Surveillance cameras, like smartphone cameras, will continue to become more powerful and their pictures more detailed. Computers will be faster. Algorithms will be more fine-tuned. Data storage will be even cheaper. In the unlikely event that future Mike Riggs commits a serious crime or participates in an act of terror, the technology that created the image above could, in theory, help law enforcement identify him and track him down.