Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, a start-up spun out from Carnegie Mellon University, has posted a face mining concept for the TV series Star Trek that allows for navigating video by character.

“We applied our state-of-the art algorithms in face detection, face tracking and face recognition to 67 Star Trek episodes over three seasons. This process automatically extracts all visible face tracks, and clusters these into a small number of same-person groupings. Currently, we recognize frontal or near-frontal tracks. In the near future, we will extend our results to non-frontal tracks as well.”