As you may notice, digital cameras are everywhere. Typically, the camera is connected to some recording device that stores footage on HDD and "forgets" about it.
Nowdays many cameras became smarter. What are they "thinking" about, watching on you?
1. Catching criminals
Many airports, railway stations and other public places are equipped with some sort of face recognition technology that compares faces of people to photographs of criminals, beeing watched.
I would not, consider this very seriously. I didn't hear any success stories about this. Probably, there is no one caught by such kind of systems yet.
The factors preventing from on-the-fly face recognition are: lighting conditions, face pose and mimics.
2. Marketing, audience measurement
Another application is the detection of anonymous face features like gender, age and etc.
This kind of systems is more stable to unrestricted lighting conditions and face pose. It is widely used in marketing and audience measurement.
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I took this video and image from this website gocount.net
Based on overview of systems like this, here is my list of what digital camera may know about you:
1) your gender
2) your visual age or age group
3) your ethnicity
4) your hair color and length/style
5) are you smiling or not
6) color of your eyes
7) how close are you to the camera
eye contact length
9) the time and date of eye contact
10) your height
