Facial recognition systems, does anyone know the latest info on this very cool tech?

Question

I would love to know if this technology will ever be perfected. I read that a town in England has/had been using one for a few years with very poor results. I also read that former Iron Butterfly member Phillip Taylor Kramer was working in this field. And if rock musicians are into it you know its gotta be cool!

Answer 1

There are different types of systems being developed and worked on right now. One is where you have a database of faces and you compare a face against that database and determine whether it is that face or not. This one's already pretty widespread (if you ever pass through London's Heathrow Airport you will see them using it).

The other system is still primitive; at my university they recently had a demo where the facial recognition program could detect whether a person was smiling / frowning / making different emotions. It's really still in the developmental stage, but in the future it may be used for reading lips and creating programs which can interact with you based on visual input rather than machine input.