News and insight into biometric identification and authentication

Billboard using face recognition to target women only

Friday, February 24, 2012

A bus stop billboard on London’s Oxford Street is using face recognition technology to target and only display the ad to women, according to an article from The Independent.

While the face recognition technology doesn’t work as most face recognition technology does, to determine the actual identity of the person in question, this one scans for traits such as distance between eyes, width of nose, length of jaw line and shape of cheekbone to determine the gender and, subsequently, whether or not to display the ad to the person in front of the ad.


The purpose of the ad only playing to women is actually secondary to the main intent, as it is first designed to help bring attention to the plight of poor women in developing countries.

Plan UK executives, who are behind the ad, hope an awareness of gender discrimination will also come across. While some have praised the content and intention behind the new advertising, some males have had trouble seeing the point as they would be interested in helping the charity but are completely unable to get information from the ad.

Read the full story here[end] 

Suprema announced the release of FaceStation, a face recognition access control terminal with patented adaptive IR illumination technology.

FaceStation is an IP-based biometric access control terminal featuring facial recognition technology which identifies individuals from their facial image features. Conventional face recognition technology contains potential weak points brought by lighting and pose variation. FaceStation’s face recognition technology claims to overcome those issues with its algorithm and its IR illumination technology.

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Three University of California, Riverside scholars have received a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to launch a program that will use facial recognition software to identify unknown subjects in portrait art.

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DigitalPersona Inc. released a new version of its DigitalPersona Pro Enterprise software that includes facial recognition as a method for authentication.

Facial recognition can now be combined with fingerprint biometrics, passwords, PINs, proximity cards, smart cards and OATH tokens for a multi-factor authentication solution. Policy creation and enforcement works through a client’s existing Active Directory infrastructure.

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FingerTec USA has expanded its line of fingerprint time clock software systems with the Face ID 3, which utilizes facial recognition capability.

Face ID 3 is a contact-free computer timeclock that can be used in business or home environments. The system weighs about four pounds and uses facial recognition plus a network of infrared scanners for a surface texture analysis (STA) algorithm.

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