Know Your Age : Computer Software Turns Age-teller
The professor, Thomas S. Huang says,"Age-estimation software is useful in applications where you don"t need to specifically identify someone but would like to know their age."After a wide and comprehensive research, the software engineers have come up with this trendsetting software.
Definitely, not only it will be a sort of fun for adventure seekers, the inherent age-forecasting ability of this software will help to maintain law and order too. Seems bizarre!
Amazingly enough, this software will help to keep the teenagers away from porn sites and other adult contents found online or on computers. The computer will simply read the various facial patterns of a particular user and based on the data collected, it will decide the authenticity of a user. If a teenager found, the computers will resist browsing porn.
Moreover, using the same process, it will also keep in check, the illegal purchasing of drinks and tobacco products by minors from vending machines. Also, this software will help to stop the unlawful entry of teenagers to a pub or a bar.
It is equipped with age-recognition algorithms. This algorithms will trace the age of someone facing the computer.
The software includes a database of 1,600 faces based on three modules ; face detection, discriminative manifold learning and multiple linear regression. This huge database comprised of the minute details of so many faces makes it efficient to predict someone"s age with somewhat stunning accuracy.
The age-range it uses for the predictions is also quite wide as it tells the age of someone who is anywhere between one year to 93. The prediction accuracy of this software is good, near about 50 percent, when it is given an assignment to predict within a band of five years.
While it gives stunning results with 80 percent accuracy rate, when given an age-band within 10 years.
Though it may be unable to give 100 percent result as far as accuracy is concerned, it is still a great innovation in itself keeping in view how tough it is to predict someone"s age. According to Eurekalerts, "Estimating someone"s age is not an easy task, even for a computer. That"s partly because the ageing process is determined not only by a person"s genetic makeup, but by many other factors as well, including health, location and living conditions."
However, people related to moral-policing may ask why a commoner"s age should be revealed against his/her will. For this Huang says, "All of this can be done without violating anyone"s privacy. Our software does not identify specific individuals. It just estimates their ages."
Further, it may also help to prepare a survey report about the consumer concentration on a particular product at a particular store. For example, it may tell us which music CD was liked by teenagers out of many releases during a specified period or what are the gadgets they are running after.