New technology releases

[Mike McCarty]

Face recognition? They can pick out Osama Bin McCarty in his Irish disguise from a space satellite.

It's an amazing thing when you think about the kind of electronic logic that must go into this. It's not something that would send me off to the camera store for a quick purchase, but it is an amazing thing to contemplate.

This is my understanding: lets say you have a scene with five people on and around a couch. Some down on the floor in front, one or two sitting on the couch, and a couple variously standing behind. The problem that can arise if your not careful is one of depth of field. The distance from the face of the closest subject sitting in front to the person standing in the back could be six or more. You nail the focus on grandma sitting in the middle on the couch and the front and backs are out of focus. Dang, you say, I wish I had had some of those face recognition algorithms going for me.

If you had, the camera would have tagged the position of each face and adjusted (made deeper) the depth of field (aperture, fstop) such that it would include the closest and the farthest subject. Also adjusted the exposure for the faces.

I understand that it will also track these faces while in motion.

A horse is a horse unless of course ... it's uncle Harry! I'd like to test this algorithm on some of the faces I've woke up with.

Is skilled labor a thing of the past? It may be in our lifetime.

Speaking of sitting on the couch.