NECs new biometric security cam will guess your age, gender, (and it would be nice if it could size you up according to how you dress).

March 23, 2008 10:46 PM

NEC plans to market a system later this year that can derive someone's gender and age from images captured with a camera "The system compares the photo against a database of several thousand faces to figure gender and age based on such factors as facial shape and wrinkles. " According to Nikkei Weekly 01/28/2008 Edition. Link goes to Ubergizmo. "It's called FieldAnalyst and it's from NEC. The system homes in on faces of people who pass by the video camera. It then rapidly compares the image against samples in a database. It then spits out what it believes is your approximate age is and your gender." .."NEC scientists may next try to add clothing as a characteristic and classify people by whether they wear a suit or a T-shirt." more here
posted by celerystick (9 comments total)

Related?
posted by brain_drain at 11:06 PM on March 23, 2008

.....why?

Is the point of the system to keep kids away from old folks homes and women from sport stadiums? Either way, Ru Paul would crack that system in a second.
posted by paintist at 11:06 PM on March 23, 2008

I was at a video game trade show a few years ago, and as a lark decided to participate in a demonstration of an application called FaceGen. They took a digital still photograph of my face, then started to modify it using their software. What truly blew my mind was the ability to feminize or masculinize the image. It was really a profound emotional experience, as it was manipulating a deep-seated sense of gender identity.

So software that is able to place a human facial image along a "gender continuum" has been around for some time now.
posted by Tube at 11:11 PM on March 23, 2008

"NEC scientists may next try to add clothing as a characteristic and classify people by whether they wear a suit or a T-shirt."

Four legs... Suit good, T-shirt bad, hijab or kafiyah terrorist.
posted by orthogonality at 11:43 PM on March 23, 2008

What if you are wearing this shirt?
How about this one?
posted by caddis at 11:54 PM on March 23, 2008

Fear the intersection of national security and marketing.
posted by breezeway at 7:49 AM on March 24, 2008

I'll bet the system is a lot better at detecting sex than gender. That said, this just seems like one more step down the slippery slope to an absolute nullification of privacy. This may nominally be about demographic data for marketing purposes, but you can bet there's more about whiz-bang technology and military/defense applications behind it.
posted by notashroom at 8:56 AM on March 24, 2008

Yes, but how accurate is its gaydar?
posted by nicepersonality at 9:46 AM on March 24, 2008

When billboards start marketing to me personally I'm through.
posted by Bunglegirl at 11:36 AM on March 24, 2008