face recognition software

The dropping price of laptops and netbooks has resulted in a proliferation of computer use in public spaces. Whether at the airport, in a cafe, or on the Chinatown bus, more and more people are using their computers in the view of others. This has made protecting personal data from eavesdroppers a high priority. Sure, a couple of dollars can get you a polarized screen that offers some protection from the wandering eye of the person next you, but for people with sensitive military, industrial, and intelligence information on the screen, that simply isn't enough.

Enter Oculis Labs. This software company has married face-recognition technology with encryption, to create two programs that protect on-screen data from prying eyes.

I went by Lenovos booth to check out their new laptops, and it turned out that their laptops checked me out instead. Thats because the laptops use your face, in addition to your password, as a security measure. As soon as you approach, the webcam takes your picture. Then face-recognition software called VeriFace compares your pic to photos of authorized users. If they match, you can log into the computer. If they dont match, its a double whammy: Not only can you not log in, but the PC saves your pic, so the real owner can see whos been snooping around her laptop. The tech showed up on a couple of Lenovos business-y ThinkPad laptops last year, but is about to make a much bigger showing now that Lenovos releasing its first consumer laptops for the U.S.—Lauren Aaronson

Want more? Check out our entire CES 2008 coverage here.

Image-recognition software calculates your age, fixes hair loss. The horror!

Image analysis was one of the hot trends at this years CEATEC show in Japan. In addition to Pioneers road-analyzing navigation system, both NEC and Toshiba showed how far the technology has come.

NECs system, called FieldAnalyst, is like camera face-recognition software on steroids. Beyond just spotting your mug, it does a critical once-over to see if you are a man or a woman and to guess your age. Whats it good for? Think extremely targeted advertising—a la Minority Report—in public places like shopping malls.

Thats something Im not looking forward to—not because of privacy, but because of vanity. According to Field Analyst, Im about 40 years old. Forty?! Im a fit and young-at-heart 36. At least I thought so. Now according to NEC, the system on display at CEATEC only contained profiles for Japanese people—who apparently age more gracefully than we haggard gaijin.

Maybe FieldAnalyst inflated my age when it spotted my semi-glossy dome. In any case, Toshiba has a fix for that—via a digital extreme makeover. The real purpose of the exhibit was to show off the power of their SPURS engine—which takes the mighty, multi-core Cell processor that Sony so effectively wastes in the PlayStation 3 and employs it in PCs. Toshiba hasnt set a timetable for selling systems with SPURS. But it showed off some amazingly souped-up Qosmio laptops fitted with the coprocessor. Two of them were running powerful Toshiba software that can create computer models in real-time. So you can apply special effects, like this awesome coiffeur and outfit I got, to live video. —Sean Captain