Celebrity Look Alike App – Boon or Bane.

Cheers to technology that changing our looks is just a click away! No makeup struggle and no editing issues. Which celebrities do you look like? It can be found out in a fraction of a second with a good celeb look alike app, and the results after that can be shared happily on social platforms. With the advancement in facial recognition technology, it’s so easy to modify our appearances that many people today are using look alike filters and creating some pretty good memes. This number of users is only going to increase with time.

Talking about celebrity look alike apps and filters and how they make our online lives even more happening by the day. There are many popular look alike filters such as Hollywood Celebrity, Sports Person, Pop Singer, Political celebrities, Tiktok’s celebrity look alike Filters, and many more, inclusive of gender swap filters that can change female faces their male versions and vice versa.

Best celebrity look like apps.

• Gradient
  A Celebrity doppelganger app known for its impressive features like collage creation with a series of images. Gradient automatically matches your profile with the best possible celebrity, and the user can, later on, upload photos with ease. Privacy and security are prioritized for all user data. However, you have to pay for the best features of this appThe AI features are nice but you will be little frustrated with the long ads. Data safety information is not available on Playstore. Whereas what kind of data is stored and used is mentioned on the iOS App Store.App Store – 3.8 🌟 (168 ratings)
  Play Store – 4.4 🌟 (264K reviews)
• Celebs
  The Celebs app compares and matches images with a high accuracy rate. It is known for its solitary features of identifying twin faces, AI portraits with the best resemblance and fast results. Celebs is an application that uses machine learning technology to identify emotions and expressions. But it is not free.If you have opted for a paid plan, then auto-renew feature charges 24 hours before plan expiry. So, deactivate it at least two days before auto-renew works to stop automatic payment.App Store – 4 🌟 (238 ratings)
  Play Store – 3.7 🌟 (15k reviews)
• Starby Face
  It is a relatively new app and not as good as the above two. Upload a photo for easy conversion; Starby generates a new image matching looks with celebrities and soon after image recognition, these are immediately deleted.There is no information available on data security and app privacy on both Play Store and the App Store.Play Store – 2.5 🌟 (1k reviews)
  App Store – 1 🌟 ( 1 review)
• Look alike- Celebrity
  
  This app’s database includes famous actors, musicians, YouTubers, athletes, entrepreneurs, etc. Most of its features are free. However, comparison with all the celebrities on the database is only available with full subscription.There is no data safety information available on the Play store.Play Store – 3 🌟 (6K reviews)
  App Store – 2.6 🌟 (5 ratings)
• Strella
  
  Strella lets users choose from recent images or click on the spot and convert them into celebrity faces from its database. The user’s face is compared to a thousand famous superstars before providing its results. Data is not encrypted in this app. However, developers on the Play Store mentioned that this app doesn’t collect any data other than Device or other IDs.Play Store – 3.3 🌟 (526 reviews)
  Not available on the App Store

• Y star
  
  Same work, different app. Y Star is known for photo modification with the best resolution, supports HD pictures and has a wide celebrity database. Y star’s unique feature helps you to find your celebrity twin irrespective of gender.They,too, haven’t provided any privacy information on App Store or Play Store.Play Store – 3 🌟 ( 1k reviews)
  App Store – 4.8 🌟 (13 ratings)

Pros of Celeb Look Alike Apps

• You can share pictures with good resolution on social media with family and friends.
• Easy to use, fun, user-friendly interfaces.
• Most algorithms provide an accurate resemblance.
• Apps like celebs and star by face are free to download with free trials.
• Some apps like Gradient provide more fun features than just finding look-alike celebrities.

Cons of Celebrity Look Alike Generator

• Most of these apps raise serious red flags when you consider data privacy.
• Some of these apps are expensive to enjoy all the features.
• Natural beauties get hidden. With repetitive use of these filters, everyone wants to look perfect digitally due to which they lag confidence in real life.
• Users start to compare themselves with unrealistic beauty standards set by overuse filters, which increases anxieties, say experts of mental health.
• Fake Perfection Syndrome is a strong urge to constantly prove oneself as perfect in the social world, although it is practically impossible.

How Do Look Alike Apps Work?

The primary technology behind these celebrity look alike apps is Facial Recognition. You can use facial recognition APIs like Kairos, Microsoft Face API, etc to quickly develop some good apps.

Every program in the world works on a 3 step principle: Input, processing and output. Similarly, celebrity look-alike apps follow this principle and here are those three basic steps:-

• Face detection and analytics: The detection camera scans and analyses using 2D images. It is so ‘cause images of celebrities and people in databases are stored in 2D. Our face has distinguishable marks that make our facial features. These are called nodal points in technical vocabulary. A facial recognition system measures these nodal points. Now, a human face has 80 nodal points. Some of these are the distance between the eyes, length of the nose, the shape of cheekbones, etc.
• Face-print: Just as every individual has a unique fingerprint, the same goes for face print. The analysed image is converted into a numerical value using mathematical formulae to obtain a facial signature.
• Match-making: Lastly, your face print is compared with other celebrities’ face prints stored in the databases for authentication and there you go! Enjoy the results with your celebrity look alike.

Challenges in developing a celebrity look alike app

Challenges are faced by each and every technology. Be it big or small. Sometimes, inaccuracies and misinformation can lead to emotional breakdowns. A very disturbing fact says that the errors detected in facial recognition are more common on dark-skinned faces than on light-skinned faces. Moreover, it is observed that detection works poorly in the elderly, women and children if we compare its accuracy with the faces of middle-aged men. The majority of issues are listed as follows –

• Pose variation – Slight disturbances in the face and neck postures hinder the accuracy rate.
• Variation in illumination and expression- A lot depends on the lighting and your mood. Although most of the algorithms are constructed so that they consider all kinds of facial expressions, significant variations can be a challenge.
• Aging- Wrinkles and fine lines on the face due to aging can produce errors and inaccurate results
• Occlusions- Irrelevant or extraneous accessories on the face that can hinder the scanning process, say scarfs, masks or new piercings. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) concluded that 50% of the total number of times studied facial recognition algorithms couldn’t correctly identify a mask-wearing person.
• Similar Faces- Siblings, cousins, and family members who are twins or have identical facial features can be a challenging element of this technology.
• Image Resolution- Picture quality plays an essential role in accuracy. The higher the image resolution, the fewer errors to be detected.
• Racial discrimination- Misrecognition as misidentification is observed based on skin colour. This racial challenge is disturbing for citizens who face errors while using facial recognition apps.

It is always a good practice to design websites and apps which don’t deliberately trick the people. You can read our blog on UI/UX dark patterns and avoid them in your digital products.

Other Look Alike Apps Ideas.

1. Using voice- How about apps choosing a celebrity who matches your voice instead of looks? Voice-based look alike apps will have a higher hand in positive feedback, less comparison on physical appearances and stay closer to the real world.
2. Using caricatures- To extend the target audience to small kids and people who enjoy the cartoon world, another idea is to convert real images into cartoons that resemble faces.

Future Demand of Look Alike Apps

It is estimated that by 2025, more than 243 million Americans will be using social media platforms to post photos and more. People eagerly engage in fun activities on social media and love to share those results with their friends and audience. It is evident with the rise of Instagram and Tik-Tok celebrity filters.

Moreover, according to Statista, the market for facial recognition is growing by leaps.

Facial Recognition market size worldwide (in billion US dollars).

The future of facial recognition apps like look alike apps will depend on how fun and safe product designers can make these apps. As mentioned, very few of these apps are serious about data privacy. And people downright outcast apps that don’t value data privacy.

Apart from entertainment purposes of exchanging looks with celebrities and enjoying the results, face detection applications like Face ID to unlock devices are in our daily experience. Furthermore, facial recognition technologies will benefit in detecting the identities of criminals and solving thefts in a better way.

Takeaways

Facial Recognition Technology has a high future demand in both entertainment and professional sectors like privacy and security matters. Once we find ways to resolve the given ethical issues and challenges, these apps will be accepted by a wider audience without fear and facilitate more fun.

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