Face Detection

Taking a close-up photograph of a bird is no easy task without high-end photo equipment and the patience of a trainspotter. By combining the power of smartphones, wireless technology and quality macro lenses, a KickStarter project called Bird Photo Booth promises to take bird photo enthusiasts a little closer to their subjects without ruffling anyone's feathers.  Read More

Imagine, if you will, that you are sitting around watching TV, and the sudden urge to grab a snack overtakes you. You try desperately to ignore it because you can't find the remote control, and the show you are watching is the single most gripping piece of entertainment you've ever witnessed. Hunger overtakes you, and you proceed to walk away and go to the kitchen. As you get up and leave, the TV pauses on its own. This is the idea behind new startup PredictGaze.  Read More

When it comes to online role playing games, communicating with other players sadly hasn't evolved much beyond using in-game text chats, attacking each other, and talking to someone whose microphone is too close to their face. Sony's forthcoming SOEmote technology however, promises gamers the ability to express themselves through their online characters in a way that's more like real life. Using any webcam to track facial expressions, head movements, and voices, anything from an elf to an anthropomorphic frog will be able to mimic a player's own actions in real-time.  Read More

Japan’s Hitachi Kokusai Electric has developed a surveillance system that can automatically detect a face in either a provided photo or video footage, then search for that same face in other video provided by networked cameras. While such facial recognition systems have been seen before, this one is able to compare the target face against others at an astounding rate of 36 million faces per second.  Read More

Chances are, you’ve seen at least one or two TV shows in which the police examine news footage shot at several different crime scenes, and recognize the same person’s face showing up repeatedly in the crowds of onlookers ... the ol’ “criminal returning to the scenes of their crimes” scenario. Realistically, it’s pretty hard to believe that one person could look through all that footage, and remember all those faces. It turns out that a computer could do it, however, as scientists at Indiana’s University of Notre Dame have illustrated with their “Questionable Observer Detector," or QuOD.  Read More

Some day in the not-too-distant future, you may be on a service like Chatroulette, and suddenly find yourself matched up with a person who looks exactly like Angelina Jolie. Well, chances are it won’t really be her. Instead, it will likely be someone using the descendant of a system put together by Arturo Castro. Using a combination of existing software, the Barcelona digital artist has demonstrated how a variety of famous faces can be mapped onto his own, moving with it in real time. While Castro’s system isn’t likely to fool anyone – in its present version – it’s an unsettling indication of what could be possible with just a little more finessing.  Read More

When studying wild animals such as gorillas and chimpanzees, it's not uncommon to use photo or video traps - unmanned cameras that are triggered to capture images when creatures pass in front of them. Scientists can then retrieve the cameras and review the footage, to get an estimate of the numbers of a certain species within a given area, and to see what those animals have been up to. One of the problems with this approach, however, is that it's often hard to tell one animal from another - are you looking at several shots of several different apes, or is it the same individual every time? German scientists are developing wild primate-devoted facial recognition software, in order to answer such questions.  Read More

Binghamton University computer scientist Lijun Yin thinks that using a computer should be a comfortable and intuitive experience, like talking to a friend. As anyone who has ever yelled “Why did you go and do that?” at their PC or Mac will know, however, using a computer is currently sometimes more like talking to an overly-literal government bureaucrat who just doesn’t get you. Thanks to Yin’s work with things like emotion recognition, however, that might be on its way to becoming a thing of the past.  Read More

Facial detection technology is now pretty common in digital cameras, but has also found its way into things like taps, door locks, televisions and even ice cream machines. Recently, researchers from the University of Manchester developed software that allows mobile phones to detect faces too. Unlike some devices that simply identify faces, however, phones equipped with this software will be able to continuously track faces in real time.  Read More