NPR's All Tech Considered has an article up about facial recognition of celebrities for retailers; all but advertising the NEC Technologies VIP product.
The premise being that retail managers and owners want to know when a potential big spender is on the radar.
It seems that NEC did not respond to NPR’s inquiries, but whomever their source was made some pretty high claims:
The software works even when people are wearing sunglasses, hats and scarves. Recent tests have found that facial hair, aging, or changes in weight or hair color do not affect the accuracy of the system.
Seems like hype to me, unless they’ve come up with some groundbreaking changes; cause we all know most face recognition software can be defeated fairly easily.
Maybe some lucky celebrity doppelgangers will get some VIP treatment.
NPR correlates that NEC’s technology may work like "a more sophisticated version of Google Images." Google's Picasa and Google Glass do seem to fair decently at face recognition, even though Google doesn’t condone its use on Glass. And Facebook does enough to make most of the public think facial recognition is easy.
So has anyone done anything with NEC’s VIP product? Anyone think they have something here? Or just the same old hype?