A company that develops crowd control weapons for the military and law enforcement personnel have now created an advanced ‘Minority Report’ style facial – and emotion – recognition system.
The Fraunhofer Institute which receives over 70% of its funding from government bodies, have developed technology that they are calling a Sophisticated High-speed Object Recognition Engine (SHORE).
The system can recognise faces with 91.5% accuracy, determine gender with 94.3% accuracy and estimate age with a mean absolute error of 6.85 years, all in realtime.
It can also recognise emotions and tell if a person is happy, surprised, angry or sad.
According to the Fraunhofer Institute:
The technology also offers short term memory for the recognition of faces that works fully anonymously: persons, who were out of the camera’s field of vision short term, can be recognized and recollected. The data collected can be summarized and assessed.
The software can also be used on mobile devices, and while it’s currently being introduced under the guise of advancing ‘marketing and advertising”, how long will it be before civilians come under suspicion for feeling the “wrong” way.