Tag: facial
These New Yorkers Want to Stop Landlords From Using Facial Recognition
Brooklyn resident Fabian Rogers knew he had to act in 2018 when his penny-pinching landlord suddenly attempted to install a facial recognition camera in the entrance of a rent-stabilized building he’d called home for years. Under the new security system, all tenants and their loved ones would be forced to submit to a…
EFF calls for action against California’s new facial recognition bill
The latest target of EFF’s action is A.B. 642, a new California bill that would “normalize and incentivize” police use of facial recognition technology across the state. According to the EFF, the law would grant law enforcement agencies “sweeping statutory authority” to use facial recognition tech to “identify and track…
Smart Gun Operating On Facial Recognition Goes On Sale In US
Biofire’s gun can also be enabled by a fingerprint reader, one of several smart gun features designed to avoid accidental shootings by children, reduce suicides, protect police from gun grabs, or render lost and stolen guns useless. The first consumer-ready versions of the 9mm handgun could be shipped to customers who pre-ordered as soon as the fourth quarter of this year, with the standard $1,499 model possibly available by the second quarter of 2024, Biofire said. That could make it the first commercially available smart gun in the United States since the Armatix briefly went on sale in 2014. At least two other American companies, LodeStar Works and Free State Firearms, are also attempting to get a smart gun to market.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Researchers built sonar glasses that track facial movements for silent communication
A Cornell University researcher has developed sonar glasses that “hear” you without speaking. The eyeglass attachment uses tiny microphones and speakers to read the words you mouth as you silently command it to pause or skip a music track, enter a passcode without touching your phone or work on CAD models without a keyboard.
Cornell Ph.D. student Ruidong Zhang developed the system, which builds off a similar project the team created using a wireless earbud — and models before that which relied on cameras. The glasses form factor removes the need to face a camera or put something in your ear. “Most technology in silent-speech recognition is limited to a select set of predetermined commands and requires the user to face or wear a camera, which is neither practical nor feasible,” said Cheng Zhang, Cornell assistant professor of information science. “We’re moving sonar onto the body.”
The researchers say the system only requires a few minutes of training data (for example, reading a series of numbers) to learn a user’s speech patterns. Then, once it’s ready to work, it sends and receives sound waves across your face, sensing mouth movements while using a deep learning algorithm to analyze echo profiles in real time “with about 95 percent accuracy.”
The system does this while offloading data processing (wirelessly) to your smartphone, allowing the accessory to remain small and unobtrusive. The current version offers around 10 hours of battery life for acoustic sensing. Additionally, no data leaves your phone, eliminating privacy concerns. “We’re very excited about this system because it really pushes the field forward on performance and privacy,” said Cheng Zhang. “It’s small, low-power and privacy-sensitive, which are all important features for deploying new, wearable technologies in the real world.”
Privacy also comes into play when looking at potential real-world uses. For example, Ruidong Zhang suggests using it to control music playback controls (hands- and eyes-free) in a quiet library or dictating a message at a loud concert where standard options would fail. Perhaps its most exciting prospect is people with some types of speech disabilities using it to silently feed dialogue into a voice synthesizer, which would then speak the words aloud.
If things go as planned, you can get your hands on one someday. The team at Cornell’s Smart Computer Interfaces for Future Interactions (SciFi) Lab is exploring commercializing the tech using a Cornell funding program. They’re also looking into smart-glasses applications to track facial, eye and upper body movements. “We think glass will be an important personal computing platform to understand human activities in everyday settings,” said Cheng Zhang.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/researchers-built-sonar-glasses-that-track-facial-movements-for-silent-communication-171508573.html?src=rss
Man, 36, charged with murder over death of woman, 61, found unresponsive with ‘facial injuries’
COPS have charged a man with murder after a woman was found unresponsive with “facial injuries”.
Emergency services rushed to an address in St Austell, Cornwall, at 6.55pm on Tuesday.
Bernadette Rosario, 61, was found with facial injuries.
Despite medics’ best efforts, she was tragically pronounced dead at the scene.
Michael Rowe, 36, has been charged with murder.
He has been remanded into custody and is due to appear at Truro Magistrates’ Court on Saturday April 1.
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Aqara’s Powerful Doorbell Facial Recognition Skips the Cloud
Available today for $120, the Aqara Smart Video Doorbell G4 offers advanced facial recognition features that are processed locally, plus the ability to store local video on a microSD, NAS device, or iCloud account. In theory, this should improve security while eliminating the need for a subscription.
Read This Article on Review Geek ›
Legislation to ban government use of facial recognition hits Senate for the third time
Biometric technology may make it easy to unlock your phone, but democratic lawmakers have long cautioned against the use of facial recognition and biometrics by law enforcement. Not only have researchers documented instances of racial and gender bias in such systems, false positives have even led to real instances of wrongful arrest. That’s why lawmakers have re-introduced the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Act. This actually marks the third time the bill was introduced to the Senate — despite being introduced in 2020 and 2021, the act was never advanced to a vote.
If passed, the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Act would outright ban any use of facial recognition or biometric surveillance by the federal government unless that use is explicitly approved by an Act of Congress. That approval itself would be pretty limited: It would need to define who was allowed to use biometric surveillance, the exact type of biometric surveillance they would be using and the specific purpose it would be used for. Approval would also have the burden of further restrictions, such as adhering to minimum accuracy rates that would hopefully avoid false positives in the rare instances when use of the technology is approved.
The bill also hopes to encourage local and state governments to follow its lead, including a clause that would tie some federal funding for local law enforcement to complying with a “substantially similar” ban on facial recognition and biometrics.
While the bill hasn’t had much luck making it to the floor of either chamber of congress, some states and local governments have been banning facial recognition technology on their own. In 2020, Portland Oregon put strict guardrails on the use of facial recognition technology. New York State and Massachusetts have also put restrictions on the use of biometrics. Even the IRS walked back plans to use facial recognition for identity verification purposes.
That sounds encouraging for the re-introduced bill, but that momentum isn’t universal: Law enforcement still sees biometrics as a useful tool for investigating crime, and the TSA has been testing systems that compare travelers to the photo on their passport or driver’s license.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/legislation-to-ban-government-use-of-facial-recognition-hits-senate-for-the-third-time-194547733.html?src=rss
Yikes, the U.S. is Now Using Facial Recognition Rigged Drones for Special Ops
Flying killer robots used to be a nightmarish sci-fi fantasy—something that only existed in James Cameron movies or Michael Crichton novels. These days, not so much. Not only is drone warfare close to two decades old, but innovations to this lethal technology are being developed all the time.
10 Pieces of Fashion You Can Wear to Confuse Facial Recognition
I hate to break it to you, but a world where your every move can be tracked using facial recognition has gone from science fiction to an everyday reality. Facial recognition is common at airports, concerts, and stores, its in our schools, and you might even have to use it to file your taxes. Some people are willing to…