Biometrics

Eye-scanning technology is becoming increasingly pervasive as a biometric technique for individual identification, both in Hollywood ("Minority Report" and other films) and in real-life (an India case study that I wrote about last September, for example, or its use by NATO troops in Afghanistan). The generic term actually encompasses two different pattern-recognition implementations: Retinal scans,

Speaking of Texas Instruments, a few weeks ago the company introduced its new TMS320C6748 DSP Development Kit, which is intended to support real-time video analytics (specifically biometrics, for access control) applications such as fingerprint identification and face detection-and-recognition. From the press release: The C6748 DSP development kit comes pre-loaded with TI's new C6748 SYS/BIOS Software

Embedded vision, as I've discussed many times before, will only attain high-volume success when it achieves widespread consumer awareness. A company called Bodymetrics, as recently reported in Gizmodo, is doing its part to actualize that aspiration. First, you slip into the company's scanning booth (which is reminiscent of a clothing try-on room), currently installed at

My previous writeup, which discussed the emotion-and-other discernment powers of latest-generation embedded vision setups, may have raised privacy-concern red flags in some of your psyches. If that was the case, this piece will hopefully provide a counterbalancing perspective. A wonderful article from the New York Times, which I first read in print and subsequently found