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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."
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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?
It's easy to offhandedly say who cares about the phone numbers of my friends and family. But for a sales force, keeping their contacts' information secure is one very important aspect of the job. If it is possible to create this security without requiring large lagtimes (like entering a PIN) or fault-prone hardware (fingerprint scanners), security becomes easier and safer than before for the average user.
I'd be anxious to see how well it works in the real world before trying it out, but if it is an inexpensive piece of middleware, I wouldn't be surprised if it started turning up on the high-end phones in Japan and Korea. I'd be surprised if they started showing up here in the U.S., but I'd be surprised if any sort of cutting-edge technology showed up for general consumption here.
I wish they had a demo.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
my evil Twin gets hold of it ?
...if you're Michael Jackson.
In other news, muggers to start taking photos of their victims.
Seriously, I wonder if this can be fooled by a picture. Although it'd still provide some security if you just lost your phone somewhere...
Telltale Games: Bone, Sam and Max
And what if for some reason I need to use my cell phone in the [i]dark?[/i]
I think they are treating the phone a little too much like a gun.
It's not like it will be the end of the world if someone can access my personal phone information. I can control what I store on there; it's my own choice whether to put private things in a phone, and while the list of people I call is private, it's really not that big of a deal. And there are other ways of remotely restricting access.
Seems like a case of some technologists with a hammer, looking for a nail.
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
Face recognition? I think that's the last thing most people would want - It would be the high-school-blind-date-gone-wrong scenario. Millions would get their new "face recognition" phone in the mail...Open it up, and it takes one look at you and scrolls across the screen "Oh..wow..um yeah, I think that I just wanna be friends... you're a really nice guy though." Nothing like being shut down by a Motorola, especially the one with the nice ass (charger base).
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Wouldn't it be nice if phones were so cheap that after a year or two of use you wouldn't mind tossing and picking up a new one for a few dollars?
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Were you just joking, or did you get a chance to see this little animated GIF demo:
http://www.oki.com/jp/FSC/vc/en/
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
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.
"who would pay the difference?"
People that are horrible with remembering passwords, and/or people that just don't know any better.
Haven't we heard this already half a year ago? http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/02/174 9200
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.
"Attention, Ugly, you have voicemail"
Table-ized A.I.
GODDD, is this news? I wonder what they're doing for security.
Even before following TFA's link, I recalled hearing or reading about this when I was in Japan from Dec 04 to Feb 05. So, for this response, I "googled" it, and though I left on 24 Feb, and these links I'm supplying are dated 28 Feb, the news is sourced from material in the making long before that.
OMRON Announces 'OKAO Vision Face Recognition Sensor', World's First Face Recognition Biometric for Mobile Phones
http://www.japancorp.net/Article.Asp?Art_ID=9494
Face-recognition security comes to mobile phones
http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS7172421600.html
As for the Omron URL, this is an excerpt:
"To use the unit, the user simply takes his or her own photo. The 'OKAO Vision Face Recognition Sensor' will automatically detect the user and unlock the unit. The identification process takes less than a second from snapping the photograph. Further, their is no need to adjust the camera position when taking the photo. If the face is included in the photo, the sensor will detect the owner automatically."
However, it says nothing to ally to allay fears that a thief could place before the camera a picture of the owner of a stolen camera. It might be possible that the camera may someday have strobes or some thermal sensors that try to detect heat from a human body temp range, but that could be fooled with a transparent "Mission: Impossible" mask of the Gerry Anderson type (I purposely ignored the recent MI stuff since I loath money-grabbing remakes or remakes-in-title).
I suppose a good security feature set would include:
1. thumb or finger sensor with thumb print/fingerprint biometrics
2. retinal scan (with enhancements to determine live/dead eyeballs
3. breath, saliva or mucous tissue sample scan and later match/compare
4. electrolytic sample (to determine voltage of live/dead person)
If they can do that (put a mini-lab in the phone) then probably only CIA, NSA, MI6 and Japan's pending MI6, Mossad, and others would surely buy up these phones, or any other devices so equipped/secured.
Image word: entice, just as this "article" was "enticing"...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Maybe one day this will be built into 'augmented reality' spectacles : you see an old colleague after years, and your glasses mark him up as "Mark Jones"
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
I'm right-handed and I've got more freckles on the right side of my face - if, for whatever reason, I hold the phone to the left side of my face does the phone still work?
Maybe $1 for the algorithm license and $0 for the components (provided it already has a camera).
Such functionality is actually common in my part of the mobile world (Symbian/UIQ), for example my Motorola A1000 does exactly what you describe and I'd suspect others do as well.
My own idea for protecting content on a mobile phone is to encrypt all personal data, including calendar entries, contacts, SMS messages (in the air as well as on the device) and potentially also VoIP data.
So, ladies and gentlemen, be honest: how many times has it happened to you that you drag yourself out of bed, look at the thing in the mirror and say: "I don't know who you are, but I'll wash you anyway"?
;)
Come on, after a weeks hard work even friends have asked me in the first moment who I am...
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Made from the freshest electrons.
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