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Celebrity Look-Alike

By Brian | July 16, 2006 | Share on Facebook

This is the coolest site I’ve seen in a long time. You upload a photo of yourself (or anyone else), it runs some basic face recognition software, and then compares it against a celebrity database, and tells you what celebrities it think you look like.

This is the image I submitted for myself, and here are the celebrities it came up with:

My reactions:

Claude Lelouch (61%): French Film Director. According to the algorithm, the closest match they have. Sorry – I just don’t see it.
Benito Mussolini (61%): Fascist Italian Dictator. Thanks a lot, folks. I never really knew what Mussolini looked like. Now that I get a look, I guess I can see a slight resemblence, but it’s a really big stretch…
Jake Gyllenhaal (57%): The Brokeback Mountain guy. As far as I’m concerned, we’re 0 for 3. I don’t see the slightest resemblence…
Emmy Rossum (54%): The Phantom of the Opera movie, Poseiden, various others. All I can say here is, “Huh?”
Helen Clark (51%): The Prime Minister of New Zealand. Makes the Emmy Rossum comparison a downright perfect match…
David Hasselhoff (51%): Baywatch, German rock star, etc., etc. Now we’re talking, huh? I still think they’re crazy, but at least this time, it’s a compliment of sorts…
Jim Carrey (50%): Pet Detective, Cable Guy, all around funny guy. Just to be clear, here: I don’t think I look like Jim Carrey. That said, I can see how this picture of Jim Carrey looks a little like that picture of me. Especially the forehead, the nose, and the chin. Other pictures of Jim Carrey don’t even come close, though, so it’s probably more about the vagaries of this one picture…
Kareem Abdul-Jabaar (50%): Basketball star. We’re back to crazy, random algorithm here. Unless you want to say we have similar foreheads (like with Carrey), but this is taking it to the extreme, no?
Dan Rather (49%): Disgraced former news anchor. Again, no real resemblance, but I can see how this picture looks a little like my picture.
Kareena Kapoor (48%): Major film actress in Bollywood, the Hindi language film industry in Mumbai, India. As with most Indian people, she and I have similar skin coloring. And if I really stretch it, I can see similarities in some facial features (cheekbones, smile). But again, I’m stretching it…

So all in all, the idea is intriguing, but the selections are, shall we say, fascinating.

My wife’s was a little better. Here’s the picture of Sherry I submitted, and the results it produced:

They all have Sherry’s smile (which is, IMHO, one of her best features), except for Salma Hayek. Beautiful woman, terrible picture. Don’t know what they were thinking there. Interestingly, I can even see how they picked LL Cool J (after the smile, though, it’s another sign of randomness).

The best matches here are Madonna, Mischa Barton and Katherine Hepburn. In all three cases, I think it’s a “this picture only” thing, especially in Madonna’s case of course. But that’s three pretty close matches, as opposed to one for me. So we’re improving, right?

Anyway, I don’t exactly have the readership to start a real blog meme, but for what it’s worth: Go to the site, submit your picture, and report back in the comments (or in your own blog) who it picked, OK? Should be an interesting exercise.

Topics: The World Wide Weird | 3 Comments »

3 Responses to “Celebrity Look-Alike”

  1. Jeff Porten says at November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am :
    I don’t get the Il Duce resemblance. Jake, maybe, if you had ever joined the military.

    My own results are posted at my blog; I’m just happy Clark Gable got in there.

  2. Anonymous says at November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am :
    Emmy Rossum???? Sorry, I don’t see anything, and I KNOW Emmy Rossum!

  3. Brian says at November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am :
    Anonymous – Please pass along my regards to my twin sister Emmy.

    All kidding aside, I hope she takes it as a compliment when I say you’re right – I see no resemblance whatsoever. Not that I could write a better algorithm or anything…