London, A new technique for matching faces before and after plastic surgery could now help police uncover criminals who go under the knife to disguise themselves. A team, including an Indian origin computer scientist at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, is behind the new facial-recognition software. “If someone has plastic surgery, they’re trying to change the appearance of one or more parts of their face,” New scientist quoted Kevin Bowyer, a computer scientist at the University, as saying. As a result, existing software can hardly match before and after photos gathered from plastic surgery websites. Gaurav Aggarwal of the team realised that matching individual facial features rather than whole faces could be more successful. Aggarwal was inspired by a facial-recognition technique called sparse representation, which matches an image of a face by comparing it with combinations of individual features from faces already recorded in a database. If the closest matching combination turns out to be made up of features mostly drawn from one person in the database, it is a good bet to say the target image is also of that person. But if the best match combines features pulled from images of many different people, then the system has failed to identify the new face. However, to function properly sparse representation requires...
New software could expose face-changing criminals
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New Windows Phone 8 features: screenshots, pinch-to-zoom camera, more
Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Phone 8 mobile OS will include the ability to capture screenshots and several new camera functions like panorama setting, the company said on stage at today’s big Nokia event. Microsoft corporate VP Joe Belfiore (pictured) talked about new features for the Windows Phone 8, which will be included on the just-announced Nokia Lumia 920. One of the big features the Lumia 920 includes is a PureView camera that claims to be one of the best smartphone cameras ever made. In tandem, Belfiore decided to show off new camera features for WP8. Here’s what he introduced on stage: Screenshots — Windows Phone 8 will make it much easier to take screenshots, something developers (and phone reviewers) have wanted for a long while. Pressing the home button and power button will take a screenshot of what’s on your screen. Pinch-to-zoom camera support — Inside the native Windows Phone 8 camera app, there is no more zoom bar. Instead, you can pinch-to-zoom like you do on other smartphone OSes. Blink Lens app — This one’s pretty cool. The Blink Lens app, which was written by Microsoft’s research team, lets you get a great picture of someone’s face by snapping a ton of photos at once. It automatically picks the best photo, or you can go back later to modify it and pick one you like more. Deep SkyDrive...
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