Computing

Better Face-Recognition Software

(Page 3 of 3)

  • Wednesday, May 30, 2007
  • By Mark Williams

Still, Gross says, "you can already see the path building." Until recently, the video-surveillance industry still mostly relied on analog cameras, requiring cable to be set up for long distances to connect those cameras to monitoring equipment. Now, "the industry is switching to IP-based cameras, with which you can pretty easily tap into already existing Ethernet networks," Gross says. "So you have wireless cameras and cameras using POE [Power over Ethernet technology allows IP telephones, wireless LAN Access Points, and other appliances to receive power as well as data over existing LAN cabling] where you don't need a separate power plug. You can buy commercial solutions that are essentially a TiVo for these cameras, with motion sensors built in so they only record when there's motion happening. With digital storage, you can keep the data indefinitely and enhance it in ways that you can't with analog images. So all these things are coming together."

In principle, therefore, as face-recognition software continues its rapid advance, it will likely be possible to search for specific faces across a network of webcams. Accordingly, Gross's recent work at Carnegie Mellon, in conjunction with colleagues at the Data Privacy Lab there, has been the development of algorithms to protect individuals' privacy while under video surveillance. The usual methods that thwart human recognition of an individual's features on video--for example, those pixelated fields sometimes covering faces and body parts on reality-TV shows--already won't fool much face-recognition software. Completely blacking out each face in a video clip would do the job, but this would be of limited use if law-enforcement agencies wanted to follow up evidence of suspicious behavior once they had a court warrant. The function of the privacy-preserving algorithms that Gross is helping to create, he explains, is to automatically take the average values of individuals' faces and, from those, synthesize new facial images, then superimpose those new images over the originals. "It may seem like the opposite technology," Gross says, "but actually, it's just the other side of face recognition."

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nrkmann

2 Comments

  • 1722 Days Ago
  • 05/30/2007

In Europe already?

I thought this was how the Europeans were keeping the hooligans out of football (soccer) matches, or at least that's how it was tauted before the World Cup.

Reply

freestyle

1 Comment

  • 1719 Days Ago
  • 06/02/2007

No more revolutions

this will mean 'they' will soon know toward whom they must direct their microwave stun guns and spiderman sticky webs.  id cards not needed after all.  let's just hope most people agree with what their taxes are spent on, because there will be no more revolutions.

Reply

meenakshi

5 Comments

  • 1706 Days Ago
  • 06/15/2007

Better face recognition software

Please explain "any patch of skin--called a skin print--can be captured as an image, then broken up into smaller blocks that algorithms turn into mathematical, measurable spaces in which lines, pores, and the actual skin texture are recorded. "It can identify differences between identical twins, which isn't yet possible using facial-recognition software alone," Gross explains. "By combining facial recognition with surface-texture analysis, accurate identification can increase by 20 to 25 percent."
      How can a software measure the actual skin texture just by capturing images without obtaining any physical samples.Does this texture not change from time to time.How do you turn patches on the skin into alogrithms.Are diffent kinds of patches correlated to different data values.For how many different types of patches do you have corrosponding alogrithms.What about wrinkles and dents.Are chubbiness of cheeks and sharpness of chin also to be converted into alogrithms and then into mathematical data for manipulation.Are formulaes devised to find out the rate at which chubbiness decreases,chins sharpen or vice versa.

Reply

whitemay

1 Comment

  • 845 Days Ago
  • 10/23/2009

FaceAether Windows login

I've noticed another software called FaceAether.
I think it's good to try.
Information from:
http://www.brillertek.com/products_face.html

Reply

dude81

4 Comments

  • 796 Days Ago
  • 12/11/2009

Resources

Hello,
Can anybody provide me enough good links on how to start studying face recognition systems.I've done enough search, but nothing seems to be taking me to right direction.

Right now I came in search with what is the input data( assuming to be images) to this software and what would be its output data(??)
Thank You

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