[Blindmath] Facial recognition -- food for thought

Wed Mar 28 15:25:19 UTC 2012

I've recently posted on the SeeingWithSound list regarding my difficulty in 
recognizing even familiar voices in certain situations, and even when my 
voice recognition systems are functioning, until someone speaks they are a 
featureless moving mass.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Whapples" <mwhapples at aim.com>
To: "Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics" 
<blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 10:16 AM
Subject: Re: [Blindmath] Facial recognition -- food for thought


> Hello,
> Yes the idea sounds interesting, however one thinks what is the 
> reliability like? Its one thing for presenting the wrong advert (wrong in 
> the sense its not the optimal one rather than totally inappropriate and 
> insulting) and drawing conclusions on someone you meet. Admittedly the 
> drawing conclusions is done by sighted people, but at least when they get 
> it wrong its their fault for jumping to conclusions where as being blamed 
> for poor software feels hard.
>
> As the technology in those areas is improving quite fast, may be I just 
> have an out dated view of it. Also may be I have a bit of a problem with 
> letting computers recognise/decide things for me, particularly in these 
> cases like you said where the answer is not deterministic.
>
> May be also I just have a problem with the idea of being weird, wandering 
> around with head mounted cameras, it really needs to offer something 
> special for me to want to do that. As an example quite a bit of 
> information can be obtained about someone through other means, eg. I say 
> "Hello" they say "good morning", in that alone quite a bit can be got. By 
> voice I can hear gender (in most cases, there are a few who may sound a 
> bit like the other gender), I probably could hazard a guess at age 
> (certainly only approximate), I also reckon its possible to sometimes pick 
> up if someone is a smoker (although smell might give that one away), you 
> can get an idea of size (both height and build) and so on.
>
> There's other things like cost (even if software is free there's the 
> hardware one has to carry around), concerns of trying to use another sense 
> to substitute a lacking one and so loosing the other one (eg. the voice 
> feeds visual information through the ears, however this means you will 
> loose some of what you would normally hear if not having sound pushed in 
> by the voice) and slightly perversely all this technology while seeming to 
> make people more independent may make people more isolated (IE. what's 
> wrong with a good chat to find out about someone, by prejudging you may 
> not talk to someone who may turn out to be interesting, wearing headphones 
> people may feel they don't want to disturb you from listening to what you 
> are listening to).
>
> Sorry if it sounds negative, its just sometimes we can get swept up by 
> things which seem good without thinking is there a need or desire. For me 
> there simply is neither.
>
> Michael Whapples
>
> -----Original Message----- 
> From: Richard Baldwin
> Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 3:44 AM
> To: BlindMath Mailing List ; seeingwithsound at freelists.org
> Subject: [Blindmath] Facial recognition -- food for thought
>
> Most of the math courses that I completed in public school and college
> mainly involved completely deterministic concepts such as finding unknown
> in sets of algebraic equations, proving theorems in geometry, proving
> identities in trigonometry, solving triangle problems using trigonometry,
> differentiating functions, integrating functions, playing around with
> solids of revolution, etc. They were all good exercises for the brain but
> were not very close to real-world problems.
>
> When I made it into engineering college, the problems and their solutions
> were closer to the real world but only barely so.
>
> When I completed my first engineering degree and went to work in the real
> world, I learned very quickly that problems in the real world are far from
> deterministics. In other words, there are very few problems in the real
> world that have deterministic solutions. Problems in the real world 
> usually
> involve a mix of mathematics, statistics, physics, engineering, computer
> science, and other technologies, and there is rarely a single correct
> solution for any problem.
>
> Furthermore, the solution to most problems requires the design and
> implementation of complex mathematical algorithms, and those algorithms 
> are
> most commonly implemented using a computer of some sort. (In my opinion,
> every student that receives a technical degree should be required to learn
> to program well in at least one programming language.)
>
> By now you must be wondering where this is all heading.
>
> I saw on TV today that shopping malls and large department stores are
> installing electronic billboards that use facial recognition to display
> advertisements that are likely to be of interest to those persons who can
> see the billboard.
>
> I have no idea what the facial recognition algorithm is for categorizing
> the viewers in a way that allows for a selection of appropriate
> advertisements. However, this tells me that the algorithm doesn't require 
> a
> supercomputer to implement. The algorithms must be implemented using
> modestly priced computer hardware. Otherwise, they would be too expensive
> to include in such billboards.
>
> This makes me wonder if it might be possible to use a small portable
> computer to develop a system that will do facial recognition on people
> whose faces appear in the field of view of a miniature video camera
> embedded in eyeglass frames and to speak information about those people to
> the wearer of the glasses.
>
> Science fiction? Maybe so and maybe not.
>
> Dr. Peter Meijer has demonstrated that it is possible to couple a video
> camera built into eyeglass frames with a small portable computer and an
> appropriate software program (The vOICe) and to create soundscapes that
> some blind users find very beneficial (see 
> http://www.seeingwithsound.com/)
> as they move through the world.
>
> Not being blind, I can't imagine what it would be like to interact with
> other people that you can't see. However, it seems to me that it would be
> beneficial for a blind person to know something about another persons
> before a conversation begins. Depending on capability, this could range 
> all
> the way from rudimentary information such as the probable sex and likely
> age of the person, to detailed information such as the identification of
> prior acquaintances by name.
>
> Perhaps it is time for a group of blind mathematicians, physicists,
> engineers, statisticians, and computer scientists to band together to
> produce such a system and to publish it as an open source 
> hardware/software
> system.
>
> Food for thought,
> Dick Baldwin
>
> -- 
> Richard G. Baldwin (Dick Baldwin)
> Home of Baldwin's on-line Java Tutorials
> http://www.DickBaldwin.com
>
> Professor of Computer Information Technology
> Austin Community College
> (512) 223-4758
> mailto:Baldwin at DickBaldwin.com
> http://www.austincc.edu/baldwin/
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