The present patent relates to a computer vision based dating recommendation system
The Internet has evolved significantly over past decades. With the speedy development of the internet, applications have grown rapidly such as Search Engines, Blogs, Social networking websites, E-commerce websites etc.
In these applications, social networking websites have become more and more popular. These websites enable users to create a profile of their personal information, keep in touch with their friends and even meet new people with similar interests. Some of the social websites are dating websites which members join in order to find suitable persons to date.
However, it is very difficult to find people to whom the user is attracted by their appearance and who may be attracted to the user especially in the large mass of people on dating websites. The search effort done manually can be time consuming and impractical. In attempts to solve the problem, search methods have been created, one of which is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,657,493 [B2]. However, these search methods are primarily based on preset search conditions like age, interests, location, salary etc. While sorting for common interests, educational background, age and other such criteria is a simple database storage and search function there is currently no satisfactory similar search option regarding physical attractiveness. In dating sites, information like facial structure and features to which a user is attracted and which cannot be listed as words in a profile are often more important to guide users in finding their potential match among members.
In other words, much useful information hidden in people's perception of another's photograph is not applied and therefore lost in a conventional system.
In the area of E-commerce, the structure of E-Commerce websites became more and more complex and hard for consumers to find the products and service they wanted. To avoid this problem, a recommendation system is proposed to suggest products and to provide consumers with information to help them decide which products to purchase, one of which is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,370,513.
However, recommendation systems in E-commerce can only find the relationship between different products by customer purchase history. In dating sites, the subjects of the selection process are human beings instead of products.
In other words, the difficulty in finding another person who is attractive to a user is a problem that conventional E-commerce recommendation methods are unable to solve.
The face is one of the most important and distinctive features of a human being. To find the similar faces between an input image and each registered image, some general face recognition methods are used, one of which is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,430,315.
A face recognition method can only recognize faces and find the relationship between different face images. However, it cannot determine the real behavioral and emotional intention of a user nor recommend attractive faces and filter out non-attractive faces to a user for the purposes of an E-commerce dating website.
In conventional recommendation systems, enjoyable and appealing products are recommended by the system. Filter functions are nonexistent in those systems except for some preset conditions. However, in dating sites, a system filter which can largely reduce search scopes for users is important. For example, besides members to which a user is attracted, members to which a user is not attracted are also needed to be found.
In consideration of the above-mentioned problems in conventional systems and in order to accomplish a recommendation service using image information, the present invention is intended to provide a computer vision based dating recommendation system which can realize attracted members match functions and non-attracted members filter functions.
According to the first aspect of the present invention, there is provided a computer vision based dating recommendation system comprising:
Attracted members seed samples generation means when building a user's profile.
Potential attracted member classes mining means for extending attracted members seed samples generation means.
Attracted members match means concerning matching the most suitable members for users based on selected samples
According to the second aspect of the present invention, there is provided a computer vision based dating recommendation system comprising:
Non-attracted members seed samples generation means when building user's profile.
Potential non-attracted member classes mining means for extending non-attracted members seed samples generation means.
Non-attracted members match means concerning matching the most unsuitable members for users based on selected samples.
According to the third aspect of the present invention, there is provided a computer vision based dating recommendation system comprising:
Said attracted members seed samples generation means in the first aspect of the present invention comprising recommendation means for pre-generation of attracted member samples automatically means and manual selection and modification means based on said pre-generation of attracted member samples.
Said pre-generation of attracted member samples automatically means mine the relationship between attracted members and user's profile automatically when new users register into the system.
Said manual selection and modification means further set the seed samples based on said pre-generation of attracted member samples.
According to the fourth aspect of the present invention, there is provided a computer vision based dating recommendation system comprising:
Said non-attracted members seed samples generation means in the first aspect of the present invention comprises recommendation means for pre-generation of non-attracted member samples automatically means and manual selection and modification means based on said pre-generation of non-attracted member samples.
Said pre-generation of non-attracted member samples automatically means mine the relationship between non-attracted members and user's profile automatically when new users register into the system.
Said manual selection and modification means further set the seed samples based on said pre-generation of non-attracted member samples.
According to the fifth aspect of the present invention, there is provided a computer vision based dating recommendation system comprising:
Said potential attracted member classes mining means in the first aspect of the present invention comprise means of mining the relationship between user profiles and attracted member classes.
According to the sixth aspect of the present invention, there is provided a computer vision based dating recommendation system comprising:
Said potential non-attracted member classes mining means in the first aspect of the present invention comprise means of mining the relationship between user profiles and non-attracted member classes.
According to the seventh aspect of the present invention, there is provided a computer vision based dating recommendation system comprising:
Said attracted members match means in the first aspect of the present invention comprise means of attracted facial features extractions and means of attracted facial class matching and means of attracted facial matching.
Said means of attracted facial features extractions is generated from original member faces.
Said means of attracted facial class matching finds the relationship between attracted seed samples and attracted classes of member faces in the database.
Said means of attracted facial matching finds the relationship between attracted seed samples and attracted member faces in said attracted facial classes.
According to the eighth aspect of the present invention, there is provided a computer vision based dating recommendation system comprising:
Said non-attracted members match means in the first aspect of the present invention comprise means of non-attracted facial features extractions and means of non-attracted facial class matching and means of non-attracted facial matching.
Said means of non-attracted facial features extractions is generated from original member faces.
Said means of non-attracted facial class matching finds the relationship between non-attracted seed samples and non-attracted classes of member faces in the database.
Said means of non-attracted facial matching finds the relationship between non-attracted seed samples and non-attracted member faces in said non-attracted facial classes.
The present invention provides advantages in the areas of finding attracted members or avoiding non-attracted members. Once face images are stored in the database, the internal relationships between members are mined and matching or filtering results are generated according to the certain requirement. Since richer information existing in faces is taken advantage of and mined, a more reasonable recommendation performance can be achieved using the present system.
Embodiments in accordance with the present invention will be described below referring to the accompanying drawings, wherein like numerals refer to like or corresponding elements throughout. It should be understood, however, that the drawings and detailed description relating thereto are not intended to limit the claimed subject matter to the particular form disclosed. Rather, the intention is to cover all modifications, equivalents and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope of them claimed subject matter.
Referring initially to
In the offline part, original data obtained from the database are preprocessed by 206. Noise data are deleted and useful data for the next step are extracted in 206. Component 207 extracts facial features and categorized faces into different classes. Here, facial features can be extracted by different methods like Principal Components Analysis (PCA), Independent Component Analysis (ICA), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) or geometric features extraction but not limited in the above methods. The method of categorized faces into different classes can be realized by different methods like K-means, ISODATA, complete linkage method but not limited in the above methods. Component 208 mines the relationship between different profiles and faces by data mining technologies. All information obtained from 207 and 208 components are saved in 209 database.
In the online part of
In
Component 303 mines the potential attracted member class based on seed samples through which it finds some potential attracted member class omitted in 200. Component 308 mines the potential non-attracted member class based on seed samples through which it can find some potential non-attracted member class omitted in 200. Attracted members are matched based on 303. The most attracted members are listed and displayed to user through 305. Non-attracted members are matched based on 309. The most non-attracted members are listed or filtered from user through 310.
Here, we show a brief example to describe the generation of seed samples.
There is a database recording the history of users' behavior shown as
In the
Based on
Here, we show a brief example to describe how to generate a potential class. There is a database recording the history of users' behavior shown as
In the table, C1, C2, . . . C40 is the condition attribute, C1, C2, . . . C40 are the attributes which are ace classes divided in the database. Each of the classes have two values, 0 and 1 in which 1 means the class is selected by user while 0 means the class is not selected by user. D is the decision attribute which means the final selection decision of user.
Take Bob as an example, the record means Bob's selected images from C1, C3, . . . , and C39 from the database based on seed samples. After that, Bob chose the image from C1 as his dating target. The same as Jane, Mike, . . . .
Based on
After obtaining potential attracted members in 904 and manual modification of samples 302, total attracted member samples 1301 are obtained by combining them together. Attracted member samples 1301 are matched with faces saved in the database 1302 and the faces most close to the samples are selected from database 1304 to form final attracted member faces.
Different from traditional face recognition model, 1303 is a model of attracted member face match which also involves recommending attracted faces to user according to their priorities. Shown as
(ƒc11,dc11),(ƒc12,dc12),(ƒc13,dc13)
(ƒc21,dc21),(ƒc22,dc22),(ƒc23,dc23)
(ƒc31,dc31),(ƒc32,dc32),(ƒc33,dc33)
Here, P(ƒi,Ci) is defined as a matching degree.
Matching Degree:
In which ƒi is a matched facial feature vector. Ci is the category of ƒi which built by said cluster procedure. dc
is the summary of distance of all faces close to {right arrow over (μ)}ci. |Ci| is the number of features included in
is summary of all categories. Faces are recommended to user according to their priority of matching degree P(ƒi,Ci). P(ƒi,Ci) is bigger, ƒi has a higher priority for user.
After obtaining potential non-attracted members in 1204 and manual modification samples 307, total non-attracted member samples 1501 are obtained by combining them together. Non-attracted member samples 1501 are matched with faces saved in the database 1502 and the faces most close to the samples are selected from database 1504 to form final non-attracted member faces.