Posted on 01/24/2010 6:55:02 AM PST by TigerLikesRooster
Are Face-Detection Cameras Racist?
By Adam Rose
When Joz Wang and her brother bought their mom a Nikon Coolpix S630 digital camera for Mother's Day last year, they discovered what seemed to be a malfunction. Every time they took a portrait of each other smiling, a message flashed across the screen asking, "Did someone blink?" No one had. "I thought the camera was broken!" Wang, 33, recalls. But when her brother posed with his eyes open so wide that he looked "bug-eyed," the messages stopped.
Wang, a Taiwanese-American strategy consultant who goes by the Web handle "jozjozjoz," thought it was funny that the camera had difficulties figuring out when her family had their eyes open. So she posted a photo of the blink warning on her blog under the title, "Racist Camera! No, I did not blink... I'm just Asian!" The post was picked up by Gizmodo and Boing Boing, and prompted at least one commenter to note, "You would think that Nikon, being a Japanese company, would have designed this with Asian eyes in mind." (See the top 10 gadgets of 2009.)
Nikon isn't the only big brand whose consumer cameras have displayed an occasional — though clearly unintentional — bias toward Caucasian faces. Face detection, one of the latest "intelligent" technologies to trickle down to consumer cameras, is supposed to make photography more convenient. Some cameras with face detection are designed to warn you when someone blinks; others are programmed to automatically take a picture when somebody smiles — a feature that, theoretically, makes the whole problem of timing your shot to catch the brief glimpse of a grin obsolete. Face detection has also found its way into computer webcams,
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
Making one program recognize faces of all different ethnic groups may be too much. That could get complicated pretty fast. Better to have three options user can select.
All white people look alike.
Last time I checked, every frikkin’ digital camera was made in JAPAN!!!
And their face recognition program is probably developed in U.S. Japanese should have tinkered it further to recognize other races.:-)
Everything is “racist.”
What if you’re racially mixed?
Yeah, I know. I was trying to be funny. :-)
Only the left side of Obama will show up... just like politically.
The problem is more likely lack of testing and a low number of blacks in technology. Most of this work is first done on employees which the guys working on the project grab people around the office for training sets and first run testing. If you don't have very many blacks around the office, you are less likely to test it on blacks until toward the end of the project.
I’m sending my camera to a diversity tech for seminar.
/s
(Like I could ever afford a Leica.)
So Nikon hates Asians and HP hates blacks...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM
I heard Dell has something against Aborigines too :)
(it is funny though that a camera made in Asia does seem to have an anti-Asian biased algorithm)
Nope - but the software was inadequately tested.
Those that claim the camera is “racist” are clearly racists.
You mean with one eye open and one eye closed?
Chuckle
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