5 ms·

Yes, and? With OpenCV, I already have face detection, face recognition, eye detection, cascade creation (for detection of any feature I wish), a retinal model

by kefka 11y ago

Yes, and? With OpenCV, I already have face detection, face recognition, eye detection, cascade creation (for detection of any feature I wish), a retinal model in conjunction with retinal scanning via webcam, and other power tools in that bag. And it's all open source. It's easy enough, I made it myself: https://github.com/jwcrawley/uWHo https://github.com/jwcrawley/uWHo

therobot24 11y ago
> a retinal model in conjunction with retinal scanning via webcam You probably mean iris. The retina is the back of the eye, very few if any real biometric systems use this. The iris is the colored area of the eye that surrounds the pupil. It's very texture rich and less invasive to obtain.
- kefka 11y ago
  Acccording to the documentation, OpenCV contrib indicates a retinal model. http://docs.opencv.org/modules/contrib/doc/retina/index.html http://docs.opencv.org/modules/contrib/doc/retina/index.html
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
    If you actually read the page, you'll see it's something different.
    - kefka 11y ago
      <grumble> My understanding was that it could back-calculate the retinal map. Alas, I was indeed wrong. For those who don't mess with this OpenCV, what this does is bring the colorspace and attributes of an image to something that the eye would see. camera picture + retinal filter = simulation of how the eye would see the picture captured by camera.
      - jgrowl 11y ago
        Hah, I was about to get mad at myself for not realizing retina biometrics were built in to OpenCV. As someone who has worked a bit using OpenCV to detect eye features, I can say pretty confidently that it isn't THAT easy. OpenCV can help you start off by easily being able to detect that there is an eye in frame, but I think you are on your own beyond that. My general approach was to use haarcascades to detect that an eye was in frame. Then you have to isolate the iris, and pupil. You can use Hough Circles or the Daugman algorithm for segmentation. I got a reasonable result using the Daugman algorithm, but Hough circles seemed to be more erratic. I had a huge problem with reflections though, which I think it is known that the Daugman algorithm suffers from. You pretty much have to take the picture of the eye in a controlled setting where you flash a light in the subjects eye such that the reflection in the eye is a small isolated circle. Even then I wasn't always to get a correct result. I think I may have not implemented the algorithm perfectly though. I never got farther than that, but even if you are able to capture the eye perfectly you then have to actually build up a model of the persons features and then be able to compare it. I would be interested if anyone else had better luck than I did.
  - therobot24 11y ago
    GFK_of_xmaspast is right, it appears to be an image processing technique not biometric
forgottenpass 11y ago
Who cares if it's easy or not? Consumer/passerby protection rules are not going to stop you, a person with nothing to lose. This is about the use of such technology in a commercial setting. It's a bit like my pirate radio station. I have it, I broadcast to a very limited distance, whatever, I don't really worry about the white vans. If I put a 400 kW TV transmitter on top of a mountain, that's a very different story.
- kefka 11y ago
  Lets take the same analogy... So, if I buy/build a 1GP camera array, and drive it around the city, capturing all the data, "that's a very different story"? Your example is in violation of the FCC. Mine violates nothing.
  - forgottenpass 11y ago
    Your example is in violation of the FCC. Mine violates nothing. Well, yeah, that was kinda the idea. My point is that it doesn't matter what is technically possible if consumer protection rules were to come into place. The regulatory environment would curtail the largest (ab)uses of the technology as entities that would use the technology wouldn't want to take the risk. edit: So, under hypothetical regulation on facial recognition, a watchdog agency isn't going to know/care about your driveway camera, but your business based on using that 1GP array to sell person tracking and demographic data would raise some eyebrows. Was your point about the ease of implementation an expression that you'd do it anyway if the regulations came into place? Put your business on the line because you personally know how to implement it?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
CONTRARlAN 11y ago
That it's easy to do is all the more reason to try to establish controls to prevent abuse. It's trivially easy to sell customer data for profit at the expense of their privacy. It's easy to store personal information without securing it. It's easy to take credit cards without using SSL certs. It's also easy to lock someone up and deny them due process, or to enter someone's home and seize their effects without a warrant, or to set absurdly high bail. Etc. Again, it's because this is such an easy thing to do–and it's only going to become easier to collect, store, and analyze this data-that it makes sense to establish definitions of what constitutes fair use, and what constitutes abuse, and to do so sooner, rather than later.
- kefka 11y ago
  So, what is the responsibility for capturing faces for recognition purposes when in a public setting? It's already established that members of the public can record events like arrests legally, thanks to 1st amendment defense. But above is in public. What about "my" property? Or the supermarket? We already have cameras everywhere. Just look up. So what does it matter that they run software on the back end? The hardware is already there. Walking in gives implicit permission that "you agree to be recorded or leave". Vandalization of cameras is criminal. Many places insist you not wear masks, or they call the cops.
  - tjr 11y ago
    The difference to me is that when your presence was merely recorded on video, it required the manual labor of humans to search for your face in the recording. This isn't something that is likely to happen unless authorities are looking for you in particular for some actual reason. Now with it all automated, it just takes running some scripts on a computer system to locate your face from any number of sources, so people who are not particularly under suspicion for anything will have their whereabouts identified automatically just as if they were actual suspects. Same story with automatic license plates readers. Manual searching for a license plate is so time-consuming that it's unlikely to get done without cause. With automatic systems, records can be kept of every car that passes through a monitored intersection, whether if the car or driver is of actual interest or not.
tikhonj 11y ago
This isn't about face recognition technology, it's about face recognition data. The EFF and friends want to come up with standards for storing, securing and sharing face-recognition data between companies and government entities. These standards make sense—and need some minimum level of scrutiny—regardless of how easy facial recognition technology is to implement. Writing software that parses Social Security numbers into lists is even easier than face recognition, and yet we still want standards around handling the information! Okay, that was a slightly facetious example, but the point stands: it's a question of securing data, not technology.

by kefka 11y ago

therobot24 11y ago

> a retinal model in conjunction with retinal scanning via webcam You probably mean iris. The retina is the back of the eye, very few if any real biometric systems use this. The iris is the colored area of the eye that surrounds the pupil. It's very texture rich and less invasive to obtain.

kefka 11y ago
Acccording to the documentation, OpenCV contrib indicates a retinal model. http://docs.opencv.org/modules/contrib/doc/retina/index.html http://docs.opencv.org/modules/contrib/doc/retina/index.html
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  If you actually read the page, you'll see it's something different.
  - kefka 11y ago
    <grumble> My understanding was that it could back-calculate the retinal map. Alas, I was indeed wrong. For those who don't mess with this OpenCV, what this does is bring the colorspace and attributes of an image to something that the eye would see. camera picture + retinal filter = simulation of how the eye would see the picture captured by camera.
    - jgrowl 11y ago
      Hah, I was about to get mad at myself for not realizing retina biometrics were built in to OpenCV. As someone who has worked a bit using OpenCV to detect eye features, I can say pretty confidently that it isn't THAT easy. OpenCV can help you start off by easily being able to detect that there is an eye in frame, but I think you are on your own beyond that. My general approach was to use haarcascades to detect that an eye was in frame. Then you have to isolate the iris, and pupil. You can use Hough Circles or the Daugman algorithm for segmentation. I got a reasonable result using the Daugman algorithm, but Hough circles seemed to be more erratic. I had a huge problem with reflections though, which I think it is known that the Daugman algorithm suffers from. You pretty much have to take the picture of the eye in a controlled setting where you flash a light in the subjects eye such that the reflection in the eye is a small isolated circle. Even then I wasn't always to get a correct result. I think I may have not implemented the algorithm perfectly though. I never got farther than that, but even if you are able to capture the eye perfectly you then have to actually build up a model of the persons features and then be able to compare it. I would be interested if anyone else had better luck than I did.
- therobot24 11y ago
  GFK_of_xmaspast is right, it appears to be an image processing technique not biometric

forgottenpass 11y ago

Who cares if it's easy or not? Consumer/passerby protection rules are not going to stop you, a person with nothing to lose. This is about the use of such technology in a commercial setting. It's a bit like my pirate radio station. I have it, I broadcast to a very limited distance, whatever, I don't really worry about the white vans. If I put a 400 kW TV transmitter on top of a mountain, that's a very different story.

kefka 11y ago
Lets take the same analogy... So, if I buy/build a 1GP camera array, and drive it around the city, capturing all the data, "that's a very different story"? Your example is in violation of the FCC. Mine violates nothing.
- forgottenpass 11y ago
  Your example is in violation of the FCC. Mine violates nothing. Well, yeah, that was kinda the idea. My point is that it doesn't matter what is technically possible if consumer protection rules were to come into place. The regulatory environment would curtail the largest (ab)uses of the technology as entities that would use the technology wouldn't want to take the risk. edit: So, under hypothetical regulation on facial recognition, a watchdog agency isn't going to know/care about your driveway camera, but your business based on using that 1GP array to sell person tracking and demographic data would raise some eyebrows. Was your point about the ease of implementation an expression that you'd do it anyway if the regulations came into place? Put your business on the line because you personally know how to implement it?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

CONTRARlAN 11y ago

That it's easy to do is all the more reason to try to establish controls to prevent abuse. It's trivially easy to sell customer data for profit at the expense of their privacy. It's easy to store personal information without securing it. It's easy to take credit cards without using SSL certs. It's also easy to lock someone up and deny them due process, or to enter someone's home and seize their effects without a warrant, or to set absurdly high bail. Etc. Again, it's because this is such an easy thing to do–and it's only going to become easier to collect, store, and analyze this data-that it makes sense to establish definitions of what constitutes fair use, and what constitutes abuse, and to do so sooner, rather than later.

kefka 11y ago
So, what is the responsibility for capturing faces for recognition purposes when in a public setting? It's already established that members of the public can record events like arrests legally, thanks to 1st amendment defense. But above is in public. What about "my" property? Or the supermarket? We already have cameras everywhere. Just look up. So what does it matter that they run software on the back end? The hardware is already there. Walking in gives implicit permission that "you agree to be recorded or leave". Vandalization of cameras is criminal. Many places insist you not wear masks, or they call the cops.
- tjr 11y ago
  The difference to me is that when your presence was merely recorded on video, it required the manual labor of humans to search for your face in the recording. This isn't something that is likely to happen unless authorities are looking for you in particular for some actual reason. Now with it all automated, it just takes running some scripts on a computer system to locate your face from any number of sources, so people who are not particularly under suspicion for anything will have their whereabouts identified automatically just as if they were actual suspects. Same story with automatic license plates readers. Manual searching for a license plate is so time-consuming that it's unlikely to get done without cause. With automatic systems, records can be kept of every car that passes through a monitored intersection, whether if the car or driver is of actual interest or not.

tikhonj 11y ago

This isn't about face recognition technology, it's about face recognition data. The EFF and friends want to come up with standards for storing, securing and sharing face-recognition data between companies and government entities. These standards make sense—and need some minimum level of scrutiny—regardless of how easy facial recognition technology is to implement. Writing software that parses Social Security numbers into lists is even easier than face recognition, and yet we still want standards around handling the information! Okay, that was a slightly facetious example, but the point stands: it's a question of securing data, not technology.