Looking at someone’s face can tell you a lot about who they are. Running a picture through Face.com‘s systems let’s you turn those instincts into cold hard data. The Israel-based company has made a name for itself over the past few years by providing some of the best facial recognition technology available on the web. To date, developers all over the world have used their API to find nearly 41 billion faces! More than just detecting and identifying faces, the Face.com API provides all sorts of great data: gender, presence of a smile, approximate mood, etc. The latest innovation? Face.com can now accurately estimate the age of the faces it sees. Singularity Hub spoke with CEO and Co-Founder Gil Hirsch about the new Age Detection feature, the success the company has enjoyed so far, and the future of facial recognition technology.

Instead of trying to understand what makes someone look a certain age, Face.com simply let their program figure it out on its own. Hirsch explained that most of what Face.com does is based on machine vision and machine learning. They give their system a large database of faces (culled from Google images, for instance), provide approximate ages for each (which comes from humans originally), and then have the computer develop its own algorithms for age detection. The eventual detection program is complex enough that Hirsch can’t give all the details involved in determining each face’s age, though he can generalize that the eyes and facial structure (bones, muscles, etc) are probably very important. He also knows that the API only uses the face itself, no input from hairstyles, ears, etc.....