Apr 15
New documents released by the FBI show that the Bureau is well on its way toward its goal of a fully operational face recognition database by this summer.
Mar 18
Facebook has been working on facial recognition for years to auto-tag photographs, but has now reached a point where its technology is ‘closely approaching human-level performance.’ In fact, in some ways it might even be better.
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Mar 12
Kegerator with Facial Recognition Knows Who Drank How Much, Because You Certainly Won’t
Posted in: Today's ChiliPhil Harlow wanted an easy way for him and his roommates to split the bill for their kegerator’s beer keg refills. So they all decided that he’ll just pay for it. Just kidding. Phil is working on a facial recognition system for their kegerator that will keep a tab for them.
Phil’s setup is powered by a Raspberry Pi. It uses two flow sensors to detect if the tap is turned on, at which point a camera will activate to examine the user’s face. A touchscreen monitor displays relevant details, including the user’s name, the type and amount of beer poured and its equivalent cost. Phil and his buddies can also scroll through the kegerator’s history to see their tabs.
Now all it needs is a towel, some interesting stories and a plate of nuts. Head to Phil’s blog for more on his hack.
[via Hack A Day]
Feb 10
Google Glass is starting to see experiments in how it can be uses outside of the usual navigation purposes, which is good for such a niche device. However, some of … Continue reading
Jan 26
NameTag is a pretty cool-sounding app on paper, but it could quickly turn into the stuff of nightmares in reality. It’s essentially an app that can match people’s mugs to their social media profiles.
NameTag essentially uses facial recognition to match people with their accounts on social networks and even dating profiles. All users will have to do is take a picture of the person. The app will then send the image wirelessly to a server, which will compare the image to online records. When a match is found, that person’s name, photos, and links to social media accounts will be displayed.
The app is being developed by FacialNetwork, who is also working on a technology that will let users take things one step further by allowing them to scan the pics to determine the person’s dating history or find their profiles on dating sites. Just imagine what potential stalkers might be able to do with this app.
In addition to smartphone apps, the company is working on a version for Google Glass as well, though if the beta demo below is any indication, the database lookups aren’t exactly instantaneous at this point:
FacialNetwork’s Kevin Alan Tussy explained: “I believe that this will make online dating and offline social interactions much safer and give us a far better understanding of the people around us.”
On privacy, he adds: “People will soon be able to login to www.nameyag.ws and choose whether or not they want their name and information displayed to others… It’s not about invading anyone’s privacy; it’s about connecting people that want to be connected. We will even allow users to have one profile that is seen during business hours and another that is only seen in social situations.”
What do you think?
[via C|NET]
Jan 15
Computers that can identify objects without requiring any human training are now a possibility, as researchers figure out how to teach AIs to intuit the key features and differences between … Continue reading
Jan 09
Anybody can clip on a camera and call it a life-logger, but startup LifeLogger says its wearable goes the extra mile with its combination of face, text, and even audio … Continue reading
Dec 18
Google Glass Getting A Face Recognition App This Month, But It Won’t Get Google’s Blessing
Posted in: Today's Chili
Google Glass use cases are many, but one that inevitably comes to mind is facial recognition. Google already does a lot with reverse image searching and identifying faces in photos, so it would not be such a leap to imagine it doing something like comparing the faces of those you meet at networking events to publicly available photos from Google+ and other sources to make sure you never again forget a name. But Google has forbidden that kind of software in the official Glassware app store. Still, startup Lambda Labs and its founder Stephen Balaban are building that software anyway, for installation via sideloading.
That workaround means the app, called FaceRec, will only ever make it onto a fraction of Glass devices, and a Google spokesperson had this to say when contacted for comment as confirmation it’ll never get broad distribution through any official channels:
As our Glass Developer Policies make clear, we will not be approving any Facial Recognition Glassware.
A subset of the Explorer crop can’t add up to many installs, but that’s exactly who it’s intended for, Lambda tells Forbes. The app works by storing a record of every face that a user encounters while wearing glass, on a cycle that refreshes to capture new faces every ten seconds. In this early version, it can’t ID faces in real-time, and doesn’t have a reference database from which to draw. Instead, like with iPhoto and other services, you can tag pictures with names so that they’ll be recognized the next time you see them. Users can also roll their own script for mining data from their Facebook network for automatic identification, but it’s not built into the product since it violates Facebook’s rules of usage.
The first version of Lambda’s Glass facial recognition app might be limited, but it’s a first step to something more on par with what we might expect from sci-fi examples, where you glance at someone and get a profile of them, shared interests and more provided via a heads-up display. Which is great, because getting to know people the old fashioned way through conversation and a gradual deepening of mutual understanding is for the birds.
Seriously though, there does seem to be a general level of anxiety around the idea of Google Glass and facial recognition. But over time we’ve proven ourselves to be quite changeable on the definition of what is and isn’t acceptable when it comes to how much information we share with others via the web, and facial recognition could become something that people grow more comfortable with time. It definitely has a range of positive possible use cases, including for treatment of genuine medical conditions like prosopagnosia or the aftermath of strokes.
Google may eventually relax its privacy restrictions to make this kind of app officially supported on its Glass platform, but Lambda is also building its own Android-based wearable device called the “Lambda Hat” that will be available for pre-orders Friday. This and other platforms developed outside of Google likely won’t carry similar strictures about face recognition tech, so Balaban’s concept of a world where we can know people just by looking using computer vision might come to pass regardless of Google’s reservations, and the serious privacy implications such a concept entails.
This may be a particularly interesting example of unauthorized Glass software, but software outside the bounds of platform restrictions is nothing new. Apple has a far-reaching and active iOS jailbreak community, after all, and Android devs have created many apps that can be sideloaded but don’t make it into the Play Store. Glass is bound to play host to a few of those as well, but novel technology makes for novel takes on what constitutes ‘out-of-bounds’ software. None of these unauthorized apps really make it beyond outlier or curiosity status, unless policies change and they gain access to official channels, but they can still be worth watching as barometers of what users find interesting and/or acceptable in specific examples of mobile software.
Dec 03
A new patent filing suggests that Apple could be looking to include facial recognition technology on future hardware. The details come by way of a USPTO filing for patent number 8,600,120. More interesting than the number though, said filing talks of controlling a “personal computing device” using “face detection and recognition.” The language in the […]
Nov 04
Pumping gas at Tesco is about to get a lot more personal, thanks to new ad-targeting software that the grocery chain is installing at 450 stations in the United Kingdom. The new system will scan consumers’ faces and then feed them customized ads based on their age and gender. No permission necessary!
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