Microsoft Software Knows How Old Your Are From Looking at a Photo

This works so well and it is creepy.

A bunch of Microsoft developers built in one day a site that guesses your age from selfies. On How-Old.net, you can upload your photo and the site tells you how old you look. This works surprisingly well. 

Microsoft built this on top of its Azure platform.  The developers used the Face API available in the Azure Machine Learning Gallery to detect and extract information about faces in a photograph. The face API can estimate age and gender. The team used the face API alongside the Bing Search API from the Azure marketplace to build How-Old.net.

The information from the uploaded pictures and web log are collected and analyzed from thousands of users uploading pictures to this site in real time. The developers used a set of Microsoft Azure streaming services for this purpose.

This little demo project just shows how powerful data mining and machine learning are these days. Facebook, Google and others can derive so much information from the just a few things we share about ourselves online.

Find out how old you look here. Microsoft published the behind the scenes details in this report.