Items tagged with Facial Recognition
Google is currently beta testing a nifty new facial expression feature in Android, that will allow uses to perform certain actions by doing things like smiling, raising their eyebrows, opening their mouth, and so forth. The feature is being added to Google's Android Accessibility Suite, which is a collection of apps that make Android easier to manage for people with disabilities. This particular feature has been dubbed "Camera Switch" and, assuming all goes to plan, it will release to the public with version 12 of the Android Accessibility Suite. The beta test coincides with the fourth beta drop for Android 12, the next major version of Google's popular mobile operating system for handsets and...
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Amazon is halting the use of its facial recognition software by law enforcement officials, in hopes that the "one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition," as the technology is called, will give Congress enough time to impose regulations ensuring its "ethical use." It's not clear if that simply means additional license will not be sold for one year, or if Amazon will also prevent its Rekognition software from functioning within police departments that already paid for it. Either way, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wants to see a bigger commitment from Amazon over what it deems a "threat" to civil rights, not just in the here and now, but beyond the one-year ban. "This surveillance...
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Earlier this week, we brought you news that Facebook had yet another epic privacy fail after information pertaining to hundreds of millions of users was found on an external server. The server was fully exposed and publicly accessible, leaving roughly 420,000 million Facebook IDs and their associated phone numbers available for anyone to peruse and use for their own nefarious deeds. This revelation came after a string of privacy and security goofs by Facebook, so a new safeguard that the company is putting in place might put some of its regular users at peace. Facebook announced this week that it will allow its users to opt-out of some facial recognition features available on the site....
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Facial recognition offers a wealth of uses, from allowing us to unlock our phones quicker to smartly cataloging our photos. With most cool tech, though, there's a lot of room for ill use, and that's a reality not lost on Microsoft. In its latest corporate blog post, the company starts off with a humorous analogy: "All tools can be used for good or ill. Even a broom can be used to sweep the floor or hit someone over the head." The post becomes more serious from that point on. From the get-go, Microsoft touts facial recognition for having uses that enrich our lives. Facebook and Microsoft use facial recognition to detect who's who in a picture. Facebook in particular has had the functionality for...
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When it comes to purchasing tickets for popular concert and sporting events, Ticketmaster is a dominant force for anyone looking to score a good seat to the venue. Now the company is looking to expand its dominance in online ticketing by adopting facial recognition technology to speed of the process of "checking in" concert goers. Ticketmaster is teaming up with Blink Identity, a company that specializes in facial recognition technology. Using this technology, Ticketmaster customers will be able to associate their facial data with their ticket, which will then allow them simply walk through an event's ticketing checkpoint without forking over a printed sheet of paper (how quaint) or displaying...
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OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei recently promised to bring the OnePlus 5T's facial unlock feature to the regular OnePlus 5, citing "popular demand" as the the reason why. Now a few days later, Pei has begun to make good on that promise by way of an OxygenOS beta update. This is separate from the original Android 8.0 Oreo update that was made available last week, as that one did not include the coveted feature. The facial recognition upgrade is the most notable bullet point in the release notes for the new beta, though it is not the only feature. There's also a new app shortcut on Launcher and optimizations for vibration. In addition, the OnePlus team fixed a connection issue that was plaguing 5G...
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Are you still unlocking your smartphone with a PIN or some other scheme that requires tapping or swiping the display? Maybe you've moved on to a fingerprint scanner. Either way, how primitive! Well, not really, but there does seem to be a hard push towards facial recognition. Apparently enough OnePlus 5 owners have been clamoring to unlock their devices by staring at it, just as their OnePlus 5T brethren can do, so the OnePlus team is going to make it happen. The OnePlus 5 is not a very old device—it came just a few months before the OnePlus 5T made its resale debut. So the fact that the OnePlus 5T could be unlocked just by staring into its digital soul is understandably something that...
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As we dive deeper into the era of the so-called "Internet of Things" (IoT), some exciting things are happening. One of them is a joint collaboration between Ford and Intel to make automobiles more connected, which would include the ability to remotely view what's happening inside your vehicle using a smartphone app, as well as give or deny permission to guest drivers. Those are just two examples of what could come out of Project Mobii. Mobii stands for Mobile Interior Imaging, and just like it sounds, Ford and Intel are exploring ways how interior-facing cameras sporting sensor technology and various inputted data can best be utilized in tomorrow's vehicles. There are several scenarios already...
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There are no boundaries to technology, which continues to reach into all facets of our daily regimen. The world will look and function decidedly different in 10 years compared to today, and while we don't know exactly what life will be like, we know that banking at ATMs is one area that will see plenty of change. Diebold, a security firm out of Ohio, is working on several next generation ATM technologies. Tomorrow's ATMs will sport tablet-like touchscreens, only unlike your iPad or Nexus 7, it will spit out money (assuming you have some in your bank account). It might also use facial recognition as an added measure of security, so if your card and PIN are lost and/or stolen, the perpertrator...
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Imagine whipping out your Android phone and getting past the lock screen by making a funny face rather than connecting a series of dots with your finger. Facial recognition is the key to making that happen, and it appears Google is on it, as evidenced by the fact that it filed a patent for detecting facial gestures when determining whether or not to deny authentication to a computing device. It's true that a similar technology already exists in Android 4.1/4.2 Jelly Bean, which has users blink to unlock the device. The problem there is that it's relatively easy to thwart by taking an image of the device's owner, painting over the eyes in Photoshop with the same color as their surrounding skin,...
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You all recall Intel's interesting "Deep Viewer" tech demo that we showed you way back in January, live on the CES show floor. Of course you do. Well it appears that NVIDIA has cooked up a solution with the folks at CyberLink to offer at least some competitive technology to what Intel has thus far only used as a showcase for their multithreaded processor technology. CyberLink's MediaShow 5 now features facial recognition technology in order to help find those creamed-squash smeared baby pictures that much faster. Here's a taste...Smart Face Tagging with CyberLink MediaShow 5SANTA CLARA, Calif.—Sept. 8, 2009— NVIDIA Corp. announced today that CyberLink MediaShow 5, a new...
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One of the changes to iPhone '09 was Faces, facial recognition to assist in tagging photos. While Apple said this would only work on the faces of people, it appears that some have managed to prove that it does indeed work on felines, at least. Yes, the folks at Mac|Life have spent way more time than we would have, using pictures of their own cats to prove that given enough sample images, the iPhoto facial recognition feature can indeed be trained to spot specific cats. That's how the feature works on people, after all. You have to train it to recognize someone. However, it seems like the feature is easier to train on people (which makes sense); in comments the writer indicated it took 10 photos...
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If Toshiba has its way, fingerprint authentication is about to become passé. Toshiba Satellite laptops with Toshiba's "Fusion finish" (the Satellite U400, M300, A300, and P300 models) will all come standard with "Toshiba Face Recognition" software. Instead of logging in with a traditional typed password, Satellite users can get access to their systems by having their faces scanned by the Satellite's integrated webcam and then compared against a database of stored images of the users' faces. A press release from Toshiba stated:“Toshiba prides itself on making laptops that stand out in the marketplace,” said Jeff Barney, vice president of marketing, Digital Products Division, Toshiba America Information...
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