[kictanet] Facial recognition

[robert yawe]

Hi Listers,

Today I found out how advanced my digital camera is when I found and used the smile recognition feature.

I bought the Canon G12 camera some 2 years ago and have been using it for point and shoot just as I did with my first Kodak when I was 8 years old, even though my son used it recently to produce a short film http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3fAdvpPKIA&feature=share, 

Today while browsing through the menu options as I prepared to do some video recording I came across a function called "smile recognition" and for a minute thought it must be a jock so I decided to try it out and to my surprise it actually works.

I took the camera and placed it on its tripod then focused to the location where I was going to sit and proceeded to get seated, the camera automatically took the following pictures (http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151355886158624.496186.739953623&type=3) automatically every time it recognised me smile.  

It took a while to detect that my smile is slightly different from that of a Caucasian or Asian but after a few minutes the software seems to have learned and off it went snapping away.

What is the moral of this post, imagine if a US $ 600/- camera has built in smile recognition what about the more powerful Canon EOS 5D Mark III or the Nikon D9000, its also very telling about where software development has gone.  After this experience I have no doubt about the lethal capability of the unmanned drone and also believe that the Americans know where Kony and his ilk are but just refuse to bring him to justice as it is not yet convenient.

In addition as we are being unfaithful when we encourage our youth to develop applications that emulate mpesa and surabook using frameworks while their peers elsewhere are working on complex embedded low level applications, we are misguided when we encourage developers to produce basic apps to be placed on store shelves together with a million other apps and hope to make a living leave along an impact on the world.  

Unless our developers take the plunge to go below high-level coding we shall keep playing in the baby pool where we sit at the bottom and deceive ourselves that we are swimming in neck deep water.

Developers out there are working on complex projects that cannot be done using drag and grope (no error), in closing, a few years ago Canon launched a new camera for which a "hacker" downloaded the OS, improved it and then upgraded the camera.  The new OS gave the camera functionality that even the manufacturer never knew it could perform (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=742806).

Regards

 
Robert Yawe
KAY System Technologies Ltd
Phoenix House, 6th Floor
P O Box 55806 Nairobi, 00200
Kenya


Tel: +254722511225, +254202010696
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.kictanet.or.ke/pipermail/kictanet/attachments/20130125/c8632629/attachment.htm>