Face Detection = "Racist" Cameras!

I guess not all groups have equal protection under the face-detection software act:
http://news.yahoo.com …22/wl_time/0859​9195464300

On a related note, my camera must also be a racist because it tries to deny my heritage by making me 18% gray!

Hilarious. I better un-squint my eyes --

Now, that made me laugh, and I haven't even gotten to the article yet.

"Did someone blink?"

I would find the whole story a lot easier to accept, were it not for the fact that the vast majority of the design work on our cameras is done, however one may feel about it, by humans of Asian descent.

Perhaps it's my perspective bias (I earn a living doing court-appointed criminal defense work in the deep south...), but I fully expected this thread to be about cameras having trouble "locking on" to darker faces. Silly me. I was totally surprised that some cameras are having difficulty with Asian eyes in their normal, comfortable, relaxed state. Especially in light of where most (all?) of our cameras come from.

Disclaimer: my philosophy of life is to treat everyone, irrespective of complexion, reproductive plumbing, eye shape, or whatever; the way I want to be treated. Works pretty well, actually...

Skipping the whole racist part of the story I believe this quote says it all.

From the article, "Perhaps in this market of rapidly developing technologies, consumers who fork over a few hundred dollars for the latest gadget are the test market."

I'm just amused that TIME took this long to come out and say it. Anyone that's used a computer to play games will grumble and nod with me about all the unfinished products that hit the market. These companies are in such a hurry to ship their products that it has become standard practice to get things "close enough" that they can put out a patch later that might get it close to what they promised the consumer to begin with.

Nikon,HP...pfft. Canons face detection works so well it could find an albino in a snowstorm .

On a similar note and I have no idea if it's true, a salesman told me that cameras are sometimes calibrated for the dominant skin tone of that batch's intended market.

So a camera bought in Japan might yield subtle differences to an identical model bought in the US. This is what I was doing, replacing a point and shoot bought in Tokyo (that I'd dropped and broken the sensor) with the same model in a US store and the salesman warned me that I may notice a difference.

Does this sound plausible or do you reckon this is a sales pitch because he was trying to push me towards a different brand?

My GF-1 has a feature to supposedly recognize faces that you have set up in it and prefer to focus on them. It captions the face it recognizes on the LCD when you are composing.

The funny thing is that it reliably recognizes the members of my family (wife and 4 kids) but it hopelessly confuses who is who.

10megapixel wrote in post #9448753
"Did someone blink?"

Invariably.

Cobbler's kids have no shoes, Japanese camera face detection does not work on Asian faces.

What's so odd about that?!

http://www.youtube.com​/watch?v=Vn2KihNKCL8

Here is a youtube video on a webcam face detection

That is hilarious!!!!! lmfao!

Quizzical_Squirrel wrote in post #9449478
On a similar note and I have no idea if it's true, a salesman told me that cameras are sometimes calibrated for the dominant skin tone of that batch's intended market.

So a camera bought in Japan might yield subtle differences to an identical model bought in the US. This is what I was doing, replacing a point and shoot bought in Tokyo (that I'd dropped and broken the sensor) with the same model in a US store and the salesman warned me that I may notice a difference.

Does this sound plausible or do you reckon this is a sales pitch because he was trying to push me towards a different brand?

Wow -- programmed in racial prejudice! So, if you're an American who happens to be of African genetic heritage, you're just hosed as far as facial recognition, I suppose. . .

Perhaps the best way to address this would be to have a feature on the settings menu whereby the owner could set the dominant skin tone of the household as a guidepost for the face detection feature (and perhaps AWB) too.

Ahhhh, what a strange world we live in!

I think the real solution is to learn photography. Believe it or not, I can recognize faces - even those different from mine - without the camera telling me, "hey look, there's a face."