Real-Time, Detailed Face Tracking On a Nokia N900

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."

Comments

Re:Finally, something to do with this phone

[chammy]

... low amount of apps, etc.

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

Re:Finally, something to do with this phone

[Lally Singh]

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.