Recognition

There's a problem with photographic police lineups – they typically only include front-on photos of suspects, which may not match the angle at which a witness saw the criminal. A new system, in which witnesses can rotate the images, has been shown to be more reliable.

​We've seen it in movies many times before … the reluctant witness who looks right at the mug shot of the murderer, and falsely claims that they don't know him. Soon, however, police could know if such people are lying – by watching their eyes.

​At some time, we've probably all seen a photo of some great-looking place and thought "If I knew where that was, I'd go there." Well, the new Look&Book iOS/Android app can reportedly figure out where such photos were taken (within Europe, at least), and it proceeds to plan your flights.

​Although a whole band playing together may make a song what it is, sometimes it's interesting to know what an individual instrument within a band sounds like on its own. Thanks to a new system developed at MIT, viewers of musical performance videos should soon be able to find out.

While there are already plenty of apps that help birdwatchers identify birds, most of them work by searching a database based on descriptions. The Merlin Bird Photo ID program, however, goes further – it utilizes computer vision tech to identify birds pictured in user-supplied photos.

Unless a video has already been geo-tagged, it can often be very difficult to tell where it was shot. Now, however, scientists have created algorithms that can determine a video's location by comparing its background imagery and audio to that of thousands of other videos.

Personal security cameras are already widely available to help us monitor activity at our homes. Most simply record what's happening, and cannot actively flag up any unusual activity. The Netatmo Welcome, however, uses facial recognition to provide alerts about who is in your house.

Bistro is an automatic cat feeder and health monitor that uses facial recognition technology to ensure the food is going to its intended recipient. It also monitors your cat's food and water consumption, along with its weight and eating habits.

Ever experienced road rage? What if an onboard emotion detection system could tell that you were getting annoyed and intervene? PSA Peugeot Citroen has teamed up with EPFL to develop an emotion detection system designed to recognize signs of irritation and fatigue in a driver’s facial expressions.

A study just carried out by Dr. Rob Jenkins of the University of York and Christie Kerr of the University of Glasgow, both in the UK, has found that the picture of a high-end camera is capable of seeing images reflected from the corneas of a subject being photographed.

OptimEyes is a system designed to be fitted to digital advertising hoardings in Europe to gauge just who is paying attention, tallying the number of possible viewers and comparing this figure with the actual number of viewers, as well as their age and gender.

Gizmag visited Volvo's test facilities in Gothenburg to see its self-parking and autonomous driving capabilities first hand.