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Real-Time, Detailed Face Tracking On a Nokia N900

Posted by Soulskill on from the getting-your-head-on-straight dept.

ptresadern writes "Researchers at the University of Manchester this week revealed a detailed face tracker that runs in real-time on the Nokia N900 mobile phone. Unlike existing mobile face trackers (video) that give an approximate position and scale of the face, Manchester's embedded Active Appearance Model accurately tracks a number of landmarks on and around the face such as the eyes, nose, mouth and jawline. The extra level of detail that this provides potentially indicates who the user is, where they are looking and how they are feeling. The face tracker was developed as part of a face- and voice-verification system for controlling access to mobile internet applications such as e-mail, social networking and on-line banking."

7 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Finally, something to do with this phone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I love my N900, it's a shame Nokia doesn't. Still waiting for MeeGo, and to get the best out of my device I've OC'ed it slightly, not to mention transition and touch screen sensitivity tweaks which all make the phone much more usable. What I want to know is why can't they get it right the first time? Since they didn't, how hard would it be to adopt similar tweaks directly into the OS so it doesn't feel so sluggish? It had/has so much potential, but I'm afraid for now, we'll never see it. As soon as Apple releases an iPhone with a slide out QWERTY keyboard, I'm in.

    1. Re:Finally, something to do with this phone by KiloByte · · Score: 3, Interesting

      As soon as Apple releases an iPhone with a slide out QWERTY keyboard, I'm in.

      Why would you bother? That's a completely different class of gear.

      iPhone is a phone with a bunch of toys, N900 is a full sub-notebook with phone capabilities tacked on.
      The former can run just a few random "apps", the latter allows you to install a regular OS with all of its functionality.

      The keyboard is one of significant advantages of N900, but definitely not the main one.
      For one, the research done in this article would be flat out impossible on iPhone due to its closed nature.

      --
      The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
    2. Re:Finally, something to do with this phone by chammy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      ... low amount of apps, etc.

      You can install Debian packages on an N900. It's essentially a tiny ARM tablet running Linux.

    3. Re:Finally, something to do with this phone by Lally+Singh · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Ahem.

      I had an iPhone before my N900, and frankly I adore the N900. It's fast, responsive, and it's easy to understand what's going on. If the music's skipping (which happened on both devices), I pull up top, then renice my music player. If I want a nice note-taking program, I just run emacs & org-mode on it. Then I'll 'git push' those notes for my other machines. I use citrix to run an app at work (note: despite what the website says, it doesn't actually require motif). The map program (not the stock one, but one you can download a package for) is utterly fantastic. I even have a subway map for my city.

      Really, advanced users of the iPhone really just want a mobile computer, with a phone tacked on. The UI on the N900 is pretty good, and it does what I want with few problems, and many, many wonderful plusses over the iPhone platform.

      Also, it has a keyboard, replaceable battery, and flash :-) I can stream full-screen flash videos in a cab.

      --
      Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
    4. Re:Finally, something to do with this phone by vinsci · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Probably Mappero. or if you want to edit OpenStreetMap, OSM2GO. These are golden. The Nokia Maps application has one big plus, though: you can store complete maps for the whole world on the N900 device (free downloads from Nokia, in case you managed to miss the commercials) so you don't need Internet access while finding your way. I still prefer Mappero though and simply zoom in to the required detail level and go over the route I intend to take in advance, so that Mappero downloads and caches the maps and I can do without Internet access again. Only if I get truly lost, i.e. when I am outside the cached maps in Mappero, do I switch over to the Nokia Maps application. Now if we could have the wonderful Mappero combined with the pre-downloaded Nokia Maps map database, it would be perfect.

      --

      Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
  2. was the n900 a good buy? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Articles like this make me glad that I bought the n900 because it is the premier development environment for phone based science, unfortunately, the downside is that there aren't very mainstream apps for the n900 (google maps being the most glaring absence).

  3. Blacks? by line-bundle · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How well do they work with black people? These have been issues in other face recognition systems.