computer vision

Smile! We know how fast your heart is beating

Have you ever noticed your head rocking back and forth very slightly when you sit still? That's the effect of blood rushing up to feed your brain.

Now Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers can accurately measure that phenomenon on regular video and figure out how fast someone's heart is beating. They say it might help detect cardiac disease.

The scientists at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory believe the algorithm could be used for video monitoring of patients with sensitive skin, such as newborns or elderly people. … Read more

Lambda Labs readying Google Glass face-recognition API

Amid questions to Google from Congress about privacy concerns related to Google Glass, a San Francisco startup is preparing an API to recognize faces with the controversial gadget.

The Google Glass Face Recognition API (application programming interface) from Lambda Labs will be available to developers within a week, TechCrunch tells us, quoting co-founder Stephen Balaban. … Read more

Now Skynet can tell when you fake a smile

In the future panopticon society of all-seeing robots, don't count on expressing your loyalty to our metal masters with a halfhearted grin.

MIT boffins have already trained computers to recognize real smiles of delight from smiles borne out of frustration. And natch, they can already do it better than us lowly meatsacks. … Read more

How robots see the world (video)

As computers and robots advance, more of the physical world will become "machine readable," whether by a security camera or a robotic car able to process information on the road.

Designer and filmmaker Timo Arnall last week created a video of machine vision footage that helps illustrate the point of view of these machines. The video is a montage of experiments to make machines "see" the human world and create some order around it.

In some scenes, the computer places a colored rectangle around cars and pedestrians to analyze parking-lot traffic or highway congestion. In others, they graphically track the movement of people in city streets, walking through buildings, or waiting in lines.

In a blog post, Arnall said he's captivated simply by the look of the videos, with their colored arrows and boxes superimposed on street corners and roadways. But it's also part of getting familiar with the perspective of robots. "It's something we need to develop understandings and approaches to," he wrote, "as we begin to design, build, and shape the senses of our new artificial companions." … Read more

Don't let your PC wear out your eyes

If you spend more than 2 hours a day peering at a computer display, you have at least a 50-50 chance of experiencing vision problems or other physical ailments related to your PC use. That's according to Dr. Wendy Strouse Watt, O.D., in her 2003 article Computer Vision Syndrome and Computer Glasses.

The advent of flat panels may have minimized the risk somewhat, but most office workers now spend more time each day at a computer than they did at the time of the study. In a series of articles on Computer Vision Syndrome, the American Optometric Association (… Read more

Google's vision improving for image search

Google thinks it has made a breakthrough in "computer vision."

Imagine stumbling upon a picture of a beautiful site in Europe filled with ancient ruins, one you didn't recognize at first glance while searching for vacation destinations online. Google has developed a way to let a person provide Google with the URL for that image and search a database of over 40 million geotagged photos to match that image to verified landmarks, giving you a destination for that next trip.

The project is still very much in the research stage, said Jay Yagnik, Google's head of … Read more