According to Wikipedia it is called prosopagnosia [1]. I have never been formally diagnosed, but I cannot even recognize the faces of my own family members to save my life. Having software that sorts faces will be great. Given that I only use open source software, I am quite excited for this new release.
> I have never been formally diagnosed, but I cannot even recognize the faces of my own family members to save my life.
And I thought I had this disease. I think root of my issue most likely is that my brain is assuming that most people I see on the street or during parties I will never see again so it immediately forgets faces and names and only starts remembering when I encounter them few times.
I would imagine the most famous people who were diagnosed with prosopagnosia probably have something closer to what I have than you.
LOL, after editing the comment I cut out the important part. What I meant to say is that I thought I had that disease, but after reading the comment I doubt I have it.
I also suspect that many celebrities who claim that they have it probably just have a bad memory. They are normally meeting a lot of people so it's not easy to remember faces.
I have learned to live with it. Basically whenever I meet someone I say, "hey, I can't recognize faces". I still recognize people but only by clothing, hair, facial hair or black thereof, etc. If someone gets a haircut, it completely throws me off.
I mainly see software helping me organize my photos. I have always dreamed of a Google Glass like thing that would instantly tell me who everyone is, but I think everybody would find it creepy. Of course currently people find it weird that it takes me >15 seconds to recognize a friend when it seems to take everybody barely 2 seconds.
I've read you can train yourself to be decent. It would be interesting to use output from facial recognition software as "flashcards" for yourself.
Look at it like recognizing stuff like cars and watches. Somebody really into the space can tell you the brand of either immediately, and sometimes the model. Definitely a learned skill rather than innate like faces are for most.
Just saying, might be fun to try to train yourself to recognize your top X people, for science.
