HP Investigating Face-Tracking Bug Reports

[Math Is Hard]

Can't believe I haven't seen a thread on this yet.

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/22/hp.webcams/

Can Hewlett-Packard's motion-tracking webcams see black people? It's a question posed on a now-viral YouTube video and the company says it's looking into it.

...

HP acknowledged in a statement e-mailed to CNN that the cameras may have issues with contrast recognition in certain lighting situations. The webcams, built into HP's new computers, are supposed to keep people's faces and bodies in proportion and centered on the screen as they move.

The YouTube video is here, and it's pretty darned funny.

 

[story645]

Can't believe I haven't seen a thread on this yet.

It should probably be in the comp sci forum. It's a great lesson on testing and robustness and all that other real world stuff that sometimes gets lost in comp sci programs.

For any non-computer scientists:
Basically, it's a standard problem in computer vision-a lot of detection algorithms rely on contrast to find features, so low contrast situations (bad lighting, similar colors, etc.) can really mess with what an algorithm finds. There are ways to correct for this, but it looks like hp just threw out a pretty basic facial-recognition solution that doesn't.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I have an HP and I think they threw out a many a solution that doesn't.

 

[Topher925]

Wasn't there a "What about Ted" episode about this?

 

[JaWiB]

You mean "Better off Ted"? Yeah, there was an episode where the company installed sensors that wouldn't detect black people (so lights would turn off when they were working, drinking fountains wouldn't work for them, etc) so the company hired white people to follow around the black people...

 

[Math Is Hard]

ha ha
Life imitates Art!

 

[Moonbear]

Did you notice that their nametags are backward in the image? Either the camera also reverses images, or they're doing something odd like aiming the camera at a mirror (there's also a reflected glare of some other lighting in the image). It may be true that there's a contrast problem with getting a good focus, but it seems they're doing something else in that video to trick the camera.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Did you notice that their nametags are backward in the image? Either the camera also reverses images, or they're doing something odd like aiming the camera at a mirror (there's also a reflected glare of some other lighting in the image). It may be true that there's a contrast problem with getting a good focus, but it seems they're doing something else in that video to trick the camera.

Someone else probably knows why this is, but the cameras built into Macs automatically reverse the image as well.

 

[Moonbear]

Someone else probably knows why this is, but the cameras built into Macs automatically reverse the image as well.

I've never noticed that on mine. I use it often to Skype with my boyfriend, and have the PIP display on so I know I'm still in view.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I've never noticed that on mine. I use it often to Skype with my boyfriend, and have the PIP display on so I know I'm still in view.

My experience was that I was drawing a portrait of a guy, which took about three weeks, and he had me hold the drawing up to his Mac several different times during the process to take work-in-progress shots of it. I saw right away that all these shots were reversed, right and left. I asked him why and he said "I dunno, the camera just does it that way." It could be it was only still shots, or, it was only certain models of Macs that had this peculiar quirk.