Entries tagged as facial recognition
Monday, March 03. 2014
Osaka train station set for large face-recognition study
Via PCWorld
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Japan’s Osaka Station could become another focal point in the global battle over personal privacy protection as a Japanese research center prepares for a long-term face-recognition study there.
The independent research group National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) plans to begin the experiment in April to study crowd movements in order to better plan for emergency procedures during disasters.
The train station is western Japan’s busiest, with an average of 413,000 passengers boarding trains there every day. Over a million people use it and neighboring Umeda Station daily.
NICT will deploy cameras in Osaka Station and the adjacent Osaka Station City, a multipurpose complex, that can track faces as they move around the premises. The cameras will be separate from any security cameras that are already installed by operator West Japan Railway (JR West), a spokesman for the railway said.
"The purpose of the study is to determine whether or not sensor data on crowd movements can be used to validate the safety measures of emergency exits for when a disaster strikes,” a NICT spokesperson said.
JR West referred all questions about the protection of passenger privacy to NICT, but the research institute said the experiment was still being prepared.
"At this time, we are considering the technology to be used to obtain statistics on crowd flows,” the NICT spokesman said. “Depending on the technique used, the data that can be obtained on pedestrian flows will be different. So, it’s difficult to say how many people could be subject (to the experiment).”
NICT would not elaborate on technical aspects of the study, but it said previously that it is slated to run for two years and will involve about 90 cameras and 50 servers.
It said the facial-recognition system can track dozens of points on a face. It emphasized that the data cannot be used to identify people and it will abide by Japan’s Personal Information Protection Law when handling it.
The NICT spokesperson said the institute is not aware of any similar large-scale study.
A report in the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper said computers linked to the cameras will run face-recognition algorithms and assign IDs to faces, which will be tracked for a week.
The dozens of cameras would be able to track the movements of people the algorithms recognize, and record whether they go to a coffee shop or through a ticket gate, for instance.
The technology under consideration for the study can identify faces with an accuracy of 99.99 percent, according to the report.
Wednesday, May 09. 2012
Mona Lisa’s True Identity?
Via Christian Babski
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Some researchers are about to try to run facial recognition algorythm on Mona Lisa painting in order to try to know who is she... but do we really want to know?
Friday, March 30. 2012
Fake ID holders beware: facial recognition service Face.com can now detect your age
Via VB
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Facial-recognition platform Face.com could foil the plans of all those under-age kids looking to score some booze. Fake IDs might not fool anyone for much longer, because Face.com claims its new application programming interface (API) can be used to detect a person’s age by scanning a photo.
With its facial recognition system, Face.com has built two Facebook apps that can scan photos and tag them for you. The company also offers an API for developers to use its facial recognition technology in the apps they build.
Its latest update to the API can scan a photo and supposedly determine a person’s minimum age, maximum age, and estimated age. It might not be spot-on accurate, but it could get close enough to determine your age group.
“Instead of trying to define what makes a person young or old, we provide our algorithms with a ton of data and the system can reverse engineer what makes someone young or old,” Face.com chief executive Gil Hirsch told VentureBeat in an interview. ”We use the general structure of a face to determine age. As humans, our features are either heighten or soften depending on the age. Kids have round, soft faces and as we age, we have elongated faces.”
The algorithms also take wrinkles, facial smoothness, and other telling age signs into account to place each scanned face into a general age group. The accuracy, Hirsch told me, is determined by how old a person looks, not necessarily how old they actually are. The API also provides a confidence level on how well it could determine the age, based on image quality and how the person looks in photo, i.e. if they are turned to one side or are making a strange face.
“Adults are much harder to figure out [their age], especially celebrities. On average, humans are much better at detecting ages than machines,” said Hirsch.
The hope is to build the technology into apps that restrict or tailor content based on age. For example the API could be built into a Netflix app, scan a child’s face when they open the app, determine they’re too young to watch The Hangover, and block it. Or — and this is where the tech could get futuristic and creepy — a display with a camera could scan someone’s face when they walk into a store and deliver ads based on their age.
In addition to the age-detection feature, Face.com says it has updated its API with 30 percent better facial recognition accuracy and new recognition algorithms. The updates were announced Thursday and the API is available for any developer to use.
One developer has already used the API to build app called Age Meter, which is available in the Apple App Store. On its iTunes page, the entertainment-purposes-only app shows pictures of Justin Bieber and Barack Obama with approximate ages above their photos.
Other companies in this space include Cognitec, with its FaceVACS software development kit, and Bayometric, which offers FaceIt Face Recognition. Google has also developed facial-recognition technology for Android 4.0 and Apple applied for a facial recognition patent last year.
The technology behind scanning someone’s picture, or even their face, to figure out their age still needs to be developed for complete accuracy. But, the day when bouncers and liquor store cashiers can use an app to scan a fake ID’s holder’s face, determine that they are younger than the legal drinking age, and refuse to sell them wine coolers may not be too far off.
Friday, July 29. 2011
Just How Dangerous Is Facial Profiling?
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