Top TechTop Tech #28: Emulating brain functions, lights shine where you look, Googling a robot surgeon
Promising products and interesting innovations
Today’s Top Tech:
• Copying our brain function to improve face recognition
• Car lights will shine where you look
• Google ‘robot surgeon’
Copying our brain function to improve face recognition
Studies of how we humans recognize faces may improve how ourmachines learn to do so better as well.
“The brain forms abstract representations of the faces itknows,” PhysOrg News reports, “and people are very good at recognizing their family and friends over a range of conditions.” Computers and smartphones, on the other hand, often have only one hard-and-fast image of the face they are trying to recognize, such as on the ‘face unlock’ security feature that looks at a person through the phone’s camera to see if it’s the phone’s owner trying to access it.
The result? “Face recognition security on smartphones can be significantly improved if users store an 'average’ photo of themselves,” according scientists at the University of York. “Combining different pictures of the user, rather than a single 'target’ image, leads to much better recognition across all kinds of daily settings,” PhysOrg adds. The lead scientist notes they “expect this technique to work across a wide range of phones and other automated recognition devices. It is very interesting that performance can be so much improved by copying a simple trick performed by the brain.“
Car lights will shine where you look
New cars will watch you, detect where you are looking, and direct your headlight’s beam in that direction.
Engineers at Opel/Vauxhall are developing automotive lighting with eye-tracking technology for “controlling the direction and intensity of light based on where the driver is looking.”
The in-car camera has peripheral infra-red sensors and central photo-diodes which together enable it to scan the driver’s eyes more than 50 times per second in dusk and night-time conditions, the company says. “And with much faster data processing and transmission, the headlamp actuators react instantaneously to make both horizontal and vertical adjustments.”
There’s more information here.
Google ‘robot surgeon’
Google is teaming with Johnson & Johnson’s Ethicon subsidiary to build “the ultimate platform for robotic surgery,” Wired reports.
Ethicon will collaborate with Google’s Life Sciences team to advance surgical robotics used for minimally invasive surgery, the company says, including the h the da Vinci Robotic Surgical System
The smaller incisions enabled by machines mean smaller scars and less bleeding for patients, Wired adds.
