People don't like showing up in Google Street View. Nobody wants their face to show up on Google Maps when they were just minding their own business buying home pregnancy tests, hemorrhoid cream and slim-fit condoms. Well, this new "Face Swapper" software found on Boing Boing automatically switches out features on peoples faces with features from photos in its database, creating horrifying cross-gender hybrids.

Face swapping software finds faces in a photograph and swaps the features in the target face from a library of faces. This can be used to "de-identify" faces that appear in public, such as the faces of people caught by the cameras of Google Street View. So instead of simply blurring the face, the software can substitute random features taken from say Flickr's pool of faces. A mouth here, an eye there.


Interesting. Who knows if Google will ever implement anything like this, but if they do, Street Maps will make every city look like it's populated by girls with gross facial hair and unsettling boy-women. [Kevin Kelly via Boing Boing]