Face Tracking HP Webcams Can't Track Black Faces

Good for HP. Blackface is derogatory and racist towards people of color. I am glad HP's engineer design a software that can distinguish blackface and face with darker complication.

It's not racist, it's sexist. It's tracking the women, not the men...

LOL EPIC!

color/intensity contrast argument seems valid... who other than the programmers and those that know anything about this sort of software knows for sure?

^ I meant to say darker complexion.

BTW, I know what this article is talking about. It is just more humorous if you think it as a feature.

Seriously, this is a tough problem to solve with the lighting etc.. They have a point, but lets not forget about the terrible lighting.

OMG....

Chris Rock and other comedians would have a field day what with the title of this article!

HP has been watching too many episodes of "Better Off Ted". Funny when life imitates art.

http://abc.go.com/shows/better-off [...] 210?page=1

HEHEHEHE A RACIST SOFTWARE,

it's cause the camera sees nothing but eyes and teeth

Wow. I am surprised that HP engineers did not know that Infrared spectrum should be used to track human face or any other warm blooded animal. That is the main reason all security detectors are using infrared systems.
Does anybody remember when Sony released video camera without IR filter and you can take 'naked' videos of women at the beach.

Oh yeah I remember that, and now the mods that you can do to camera's to allow that on some models lol

On this topic its kinda funny, I am sure it was not done on purpose just kind of funny though. I do mean haha funny not like oh that smells kinda funny lol I also am 100% sure there will be some sort of software update to fix this

As soon as my blackness enters the frame

LMFAO

and I'm fairly dark skinned since my dad is jamaican but LMFAO so funny the way he phrases it

I'm smelling a lawsuit coming.

Saw this over the weekend and it made my day. Its pretty funny truth be told. At least now we know most of HP's testers are white lol.

Of course you should use IR to track people's faces. Unfortunately, most webcams on laptops don't ship with IR cameras. They've got to work with crappy-quality images under variable lighting conditions.

Racist web cams... I LOVE IT!

So funny!

Camera's that don't track black people. Does anybody else see the problem with that?

No problem. It perfect. So when we sneak up on your stupid @ss we can hit you with the stupid moron stick and the camera will miss us. You get the dumb @ss smackdown and the camera only sees you. I think it is a feature.

I wonder if I could smack Sarah Palin in front of one of these and get away with it.... She's a dumb @ss too.... hmmm.

First the cabs, now the webcams ignore black people!

Jokes aside, this is obviously a flaw in development and not intentional. After all, there is a reason for the words "black" and "white". They didn't test it enough on black people, or not at all, so thy didn't took into account the different colors and contrast and blah blah blah necessary to make this work.

I'm pretty sure that an star wars geek disguised as a green or blue alien wouldn't be tracked either because of the different color of his silly painted face.

Well most of current webcam are based on small CCD sensor. By nature CCD sensor can see IR just fine. All web cams has IR filter. If I was tasked to do this I could use clever color filter that allowed to get 4 images: RED, GREEN, BLUE and IR. Use the IR data for tracking purposes. This filter could be quite expensive so cheaper solution could be using 2 CCD chips: 1st normal one and 2nd without IR filter.


That is exactly why they should IR - not a visible light.
It would be more expensive, but damage control campaign now will cost them much more. I believe last year at CES there was company from Israel that had a tracking camera and it worked great. Their software not only tracked faces it was recognizing gestures also.

Wicked lol, at least they're taking it lightly

The problem was the software was devolved in some part, with are really difficult to found, black people like some cities in Latin-American, and they didn’t tasted whit black people.

Life imitating art?????

There was an episode of Better of Ted (last year) that dealt specifically with a security system that could not track black people.

Sucks to be black! Lol!

black people can afford laptops? lol

I know, I'm gonna get flamed for that, it's just a joke. I make fun of Asians as well and my gf and inlaws are Asian, and my son is half Asian too. I'm not racist, I hate everyone

As someone that has worked on face tracking programs before I can tell you that using an IR camera is not good for general face tracking. If the camera is use outside the sunlight tends to flood the sensor and it's hard to get a good image.
Back on topic, there are algorithms to track faces that can cope with skin color differences. I don't know why they weren't used. Maybe they are too CPU intensive for the system.

Funny guy.

My experience is with security cameras. Only problem we had was direct sun in the frame or reflection from big glass windows across the street. In any other situation we got better face pictures using IR mode of the cameras. At the same time I thing this is because we was using much better optics then webcams. What I know that heating the room to body temperature in order to blind the security IR camera only works on cheap IR cameras. The bright IR LEDs will do much better job.

hello lawsuit!!! that is all I got to say to this.

I am a black consumer buying a product that is suppose to track my face, oh but wait only tracks whites and not blacks??? wtf only for whites and not for everyone... wtf