[Blindmath] Facial recognition -- food for thought

Wed Mar 28 15:33:07 UTC 2012

Hi Michael,

Those are all good points and I respect them all. I will respond only to
the one involving walking around with a camera on your head.

These days there are many sighted people walking around who appear to be
talking to themselves. Actually, they are talking to someone on a cellphone
using a bluetooth earpiece.

The other day I saw an advertisement for such an earpiece that had a tiny
video camera built in. Wearing that, you would look just like all of the
other weird people walking around talking to themselves.

Tiny video cameras are also available in a number of other formats
including lapel pens, etc. Also, the camera that is built into the eyeglass
frames is nearly invisible.

Dick Baldwin

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 10:16 AM, Michael Whapples <mwhapples at aim.com>wrote:

> 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/ <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/ <http://www.austincc.edu/baldwin/>
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-- 
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/