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While you watch the ads watch YOU….

Since around 1964, while many of us have been sleeping (others of us may not have been BORN in 1964), systems for the computerized recognition of human faces (including 3D face recognition) have been getting smarter and smarter. Facial recognition systems do not even need visible light to work; they work perfectly well in apparent “darkness” using infrared illumination that is invisible to the human eye.

I have sometimes wondered (but not really) why two companies that I really generally respect, Apple and Google, have incorporated facial recognition software into their products iPhoto (searched with Spotlight) and Picasa (from version 3.5 onward), respectively. I sometimes think of the feature as “the coolest feature that I never ever asked for!” If you give it some thought, you may reach conclusions about why it is there. (I wondered about the feature when it showed up in iPhoto, and then it showed up in Picasa, too.) I don’t think that it was from a groundswell of enhancement requests by users like you and me. :-)

The feature became especially annoying for me when I downloaded a Picasa upgrade (probably to 3.5) and the software began AUTOMATICALLY, unbidden, :-) to start analyzing and categorizing the photos on my machine. I stopped it right away and have not restarted it since. No, I am (obviously) not a Luddite, but I adopt only technology that is more beneficial to me than potentially harmful. I will probably never carry another pager (if they still exist) in my life (never wanted to; there ARE no benefits), :-) and I recognize the sometimes questionable risk/benefit ratio of cell phones.

It may surprise some Americans to learn that a number of other countries have been leading the deployment of new technologies. The fact first struck me in 1995, when I visited a display of Panasonic flat-screen TVs at a department store in downtown Osaka, Japan. I am sometimes very happy to see other countries try social experiments before the U.S. tries them, especially those in which the cost of “failure” is high. The experiment itself might “succeed,” but produce a large, negative effect on the society that might be hard to reverse. Sometimes it really is hard to put the Genie “back in the bottle.”

CNN has an article today that describes electronic billboards in Tokyo that, with an embedded camera, use facial recognition technology to determine your gender and age (and who knows what else) and to serve to you the OPTIMUM advertisement, based upon your demographics. CNN compares the phenomenon to a scene in Steven Spielberg‘s 2002 movie, “Minority Report,” in which cameras in a mall scan the retinas of Tom Cruise and offer up ideal advertisements for him. The CNN reporter, a woman in her 30s, was offered a very appealing lunch advertisement. The current technology by NEC estimates your age within 10 years. New technology demonstrated at a fair in Tokyo got her age right every time! She quotes a consultant from the Netherlands who believes “in this kind of thing.” NEC spokesman Kosuke Yamauchi predicts that within two to three years, such electronic billboards will represent 10% of digital signage GLOBALLY.

Of course the sign works both ways. While the sign is offering YOU an optimum advertisement, it is transmitting information ABOUT YOU back to the database of the company presenting the ads.

Since most of us plan to live longer than two or three more years, :-) we can only speculate what advertising will look like in our lifetimes, ESPECIALLY if signs with facial recognition systems are successful in SELLING.

According to the Wikipedia article called “Facial recognition system,” the early development of facial recognition systems in 1964-1965, by pioneers Woody Bledsoe, Helen Chan Wolf, and Charles Bisson, was funded by an unnamed intelligence agency that did not allow much publicity. After Bledsoe left PRI in 1966, the work was continued at the Stanford Research Institute (in Menlo Park, California) principally by Peter Hart. The computer consistently outperformed facial recognition by humans on a database of 2000 photographs. The Wikipedia article further states:

‘By about 1997, the system developed by Christoph von der Malsburg and graduate students of the University of Bochum in Germany and the University of Southern California in the United States outperformed most systems with those of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland rated next. The Bochum system was developed through funding by the United States Army Research Laboratory. The software was sold as ZN-Face and used by customers such as Deutsche Bank and operators of airports and other busy locations. The software was “robust enough to make identifications from less-than-perfect face views. It can also often see through such impediments to identification as mustaches, beards, changed hair styles and glasses—even sunglasses.” In about January 2007, image searches were “based on the text surrounding a photo,” for example, if text nearby mentions the image content. Polar Rose technology can guess from a photograph, in about 1.5 seconds, what any individual may look like in three dimensions, and thought they “will ask users to input the names of people they recognize in photos online” to help build a database.’

“Coincidentally,” :-) asking users to input the names of people they recognize in photos online” (and on their machines) is what programs like iPhoto and Picasa do. :-) We have come a long way since the voluntary distributed computing (list of projects here) of SETI@Home!

(Wikipedia notes that WAY back in 2001, at Super Bowl XXXV, police in Tampa Bay, Florida, used Identix’s facial recognition software, FaceIt, to search for potential criminals and terrorists in attendance at the event. The system found 19 people with pending arrest warrants – WAY back in 2001.)

A “friend of a friend” (jokingly) posted on Facebook that he was going to start wearing “Groucho Glasses”) to defeat facial recognition by the millions of cameras (including the ones in cell phones and the “traffic cameras”) that are proliferating in the U.S. It sounds like Groucho Glasses are woefully inadequate when pitted against modern facial recognition systems, but they may help us “lighten up” a bit under the increasing stress of surveillance. :-)

-Bill at

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