Machines That Can See

摘要

Ensuring that employees wear warm smiles when helping customers is good business-but no easy task, even for attentive managers. Omron Corporation, a Japanese developer of robotics software, is concocting a solution. Its software can analyse digital images, including video, to recognise and classify facial expressions. Soon the company will start selling a "smile measurement" system that will alert managers-in real time, if desired-when a cashier fails to muster an adequate grin. The software is configurable, so employers will be able to decide just how happy their employees should appear.rnUsing computers to measure smiles will strike many as absurd. Yet machines are learning to see in increasingly reliable and useful ways, opening up a wide range of new applications. Indeed, computer vision, also known as object recognition, has developed so rapidly over the past few years that rather than struggling to make sense of what they see, computers can now outperform humans in some cases. Curiously enough, one such category is interpreting human facial expressions.