Face-Detection Cameras: Users' Racism Charges Explained (Cameras are Racist)

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 Techland's 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, which is 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, where it can track a person's face during a video conference or enable face-recognition software to prevent unauthorized access.

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re: All 1’s will be overwritten with 0’s (of course)

Bigot! How dare you? Have you no shame? ANYONE with any common sense knows that 0’s are the digit of choice.

Although, I possible could live with a compromise here. How ‘bout this? We let either a 1 or a 0 be acceptable. That will not please those who feel one is better than the other but it will probably be sufficient for those who with no preference.

See, it's easy to get along if you don't insist on standards! Thanks!

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