02/01/10

From Popular Science

Bees Can Be Trained to Recognize Human Faces
 
Tiny bee brains could serve as models for facial recognition systems

By Jeremy Hsu

Bees need not recognize human faces when going about their pollination business. Yet scientists have now found that they can train bees to recognize the arrangement of human facial features, by rewarding the classy striped insects with sugar. That could inspire new facial recognition systems, given that bees manage this feat with brains the size of a microdot.

The bee ability to distinguish between human faces was first noticed by Adrian Dyer, a vision scientist from Monash University in Australia. But biologist Martin Giurfa from the Université de Toulouse in France wanted to better understand how bees managed to learn facial features, and so he teamed up with Dyer to carry out a more systematic test.

It turns out that bees don't consciously recognize individual people, so much as the relative pattern that makes up a face. Researchers tested this by first training the bees to recognize simple faces made of dots and slashes, and then seeing if the bees could distinguish between two different faces. The bees passed the test.

Next, the research team gave the bees a choice between new faces and a random assort of dots and slashes. The bees still ended up homing in on the face-like patterns. Equally as impressive, the bees learned to recognize stick-and-dot faces against face-shaped photographs, and still identified the correct faces without the photo backgrounds.

Other insects have continued to prompt new research on full-color night vision for drivers. But face-recognition technology has a special place in the hearts of governments and security agencies, so we'd expect to hear some follow-up on this.

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CIA Director Leon Panetta has firmly denied rumors that the agency is exploiting a newly found capability of bees to develop an assassination weapon. Rumors have swirled in some quarters that a secret CIA lab was training the highly aggressive Africanized honeybee, known as the "killer bee" to attack specific individuals. Panetta suggested that the whole idea was sheer fantasy since the CIA was forbidden to carry out assassinations of enemy political figures and bees would be too fragile and impractical to transport overseas where the CIA operates, noting that the agency is not authorized to carry out any activities within U.S. jurisdictions.