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Cell Phones Learn to Recognize Their Owners' Faces
An anonymous reader writes "Oki Electric this week began marketing a technology that inexpensively adds face recognition to camera-equipped cell phones. Oki's 'Face Sensing Engine' middleware decodes facial images within 280 milliseconds on a 100 MHz ARM9 processor, and can restrict access to mobile devices by recognizing their owners. Its purpose is to safeguard sensitive personal data -- such as email addresses and phone numbers -- in the event of loss or theft of their devices. The technology works by locating and mapping key facial features -- such as eyes, eyebrows, and mouth -- and adapts to changing facial conditions such as winking and smiling, according to Oki."
I see a bruised accident victim denied access to make an emergency call.
All of this security is great if you're a secret agent, but I am not employed by the CIA. If I were to loose my phone, I would hope the finder would use the information in there to try to return the phone. What happens when someone with good intentions finds my phone and can't return it because I presumed him/her to be a theif and "safe"guarded it with this new technology?
And what if for some reason I need to use my cell phone in the [i]dark?[/i]
The problem I have with biometrics is that in the case of fingerprints, face scans, eye scans etc.. is that somebody could always chop off the particular body part to get access. With a password, you can't kill someone to get at it - or you lose the password entirely.
Passwords are pretty good IMHO.
Discuss.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
How is this better than a good password? My passwords are private. My face is public and goes everywhere I go. All someone has to do to crack my phone is take a picture of me, print it, and show it to my phone. Bang, now they can call Elbonia on my dime.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
however, wouldn't the security of this "technology" be compromised by merely taking a picture of the owner with a camera and then stealing the phone? The phone will react to the face on the printed picture and allow access to it, potentionally allowing the thief to disable this "feature" and resell the phone..
How likely is this
In other words...
1. Take picture/video clip of person owning phone
2. Steal it!
3. Print picture or show vid clip using your computer monitor
4. disable the identity protection
5. ???
6. PROFIT!!!
... just go pick up a copy of People magazine and hold up the picture in front of the phone.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I find it way more practical to have voice recognition than facial recongnition for security reasons. Someone's voice could get recorded and then played back, but if a specific phrase would be recognized only, then it would be kind of tough to force a the owner to say it to a recorder.
it would work in ultra-macro mode only - such camera would ned serious lens twisting to be able to make normal photos too. A photo of a landscape or a car, or your ass can be made with about the same lens as an "ID photo" of your face. A photo of your iris - can't. There's less difference in focus settings between 1m and infinity than between 1cm and 3cm.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
IMHO, Nokia makes the best cellphones around. The number one thing I think they do better than everyone else is build well-design intuitive human interfaces (both in terms of onscreen menus and the hardware of the phone itself (button types, locations, etc)). Aside from that, they're pretty solidly built for a cellphone, and in my experience tend to get better reception in poor-reception areas. I would pay more for Nokia anyday.
11*43+456^2
Of these phones that are trying to be PDA or biometrics or video cameras. What I'd rather have is a phone that's just trying to be a phone
I mean I honestly don't care if my phone recognizes my gate or face or anything else. And if I lend my phone to someone, I want them to be able to use it. If they steal my phone, well it was probably my own dumb fault anyhow and I'll talk to my carrier.
I wish they'd just focus on making better phones that has better audio quality and cut out less. The phone I have today (1 yr old give or take) is still nowhere near as good as it should be in a major urban setting. Surely the processor cycles being dedicated to all these cool new features could be used for some additional signal processing?
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Science -- Sealed, Delivered.
Not again! I worked on face recognition for several years, for applications unrelated to security (e.g. searching photo collections for family members). Time and time again people said "Hey, you could use this for access control!" and would't listen when I pointed out that you would be lucky to get a recognition accuracy of 70% in real-world conditions. I've implemented methods which claimed a 99.X% recognition rate and found the real-world results were often as low as 60%... I assume people don't lie when they publish these things, but they clearly construct their test sets very carefully :-)
Sure, you can make a system which stops a blonde woman from accessing a dark-haired man's phone; but distinguishing between two similar looking people and still allowing an individual's apperance to vary is not currently possible (even for a lot of humans!)
rt
Ok, interesting, but what happens in the unfortunate event some criminals beat you up? you need to call 911 but the cell phone doesn't recognize you since your face is inflated like a scottish bagpipe... ehhh what happens then?