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Jacaylbaro

HP camera 'can't see' black faces

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A YouTube video suggesting that face recognition cameras installed in HP laptops cannot detect black faces has had over one million views.

 

The short movie, uploaded earlier this month, features "Black Desi" and his colleague "White Wanda".

 

When Wanda, a white woman, is in front of the screen, the camera zooms to her face and moves as she moves.

 

But when Desi, a black man, does the same, the camera does not respond by tracking him.

 

The clip is light-hearted in tone but is titled "HP computers are racist".

 

"HP has been informed of a potential issue with the facial-tracking software included on some of its systems, which appears to occur when insufficient foreground lighting is available," an HP spokesman told BBC News.

 

"We take this seriously and are looking into it with our partners."

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ElPunto   

"when insufficient foreground lighting is available"

 

There you go folks. All you have to do is make sure there is sufficient foreground lighting is available. There are a range of chemicals that will help you rectify this problem. It's not HP's fault - it's yours.

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How this got past their QA/QC dept is strange.

something similar happened to me when I was in uni.

 

we were developing methods to alleviate traffic congestion each group took a different route. my team mounted cameras on traffic intersections and used contrast to detect congestion i.e the color of road was black and the color of the vehicles was lighter colors .. if the camera could detect say 80% black there was no congestion but if all the black was covered by light colors the camera detected 20% black visible .. and we used this an assumption of congestion and we varied signal timings accordingly.

 

how we were going to get this to work when there was insufficient light or visibility (night, fog)or even the thought of dark color vehicles on dark color roads never entered our thought so that if you had 100% congestion with dark vehicles it showed as no congestion and signal timing did not change to reflect conditions.

 

we had to redo the whole thing using trip sensors and count the frequency of vehicles across particular cross sections.

 

our eagerness to use these very cool cameras blinkered us a humbling and costly experience for a broke student ...

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Cara.   

^Hmmm, on reading your approach my first thought was "what about a black car at night-time?"

 

Maybe it's because in my line of work you must list every caveat, ambiguity, possible exception and source of error. We don't actually bother with the practical significance of our findings though. But you can bet we can dismantle your idea to save the world before you're done describing it!

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^ we hadn't taken courses in control systems or proper design methods at the the time and we were a bit eager too eager to play with the camera's ... "measure twice, cut once" has been drummed into me since.

 

but this was never going to be implemented in the field anyway .. we were divided into 10 groups and each group had to come up with a different approaches and demonstrate it on a small scale model.

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Mario B;869925 wrote:
Is this still true, or has technology rectified this anomaly?

 

Lol @ El-Punto suggesting skin bleaching.
:D

Nal Nal Nal. Lights Lights Lights. Always works out for my YT videos.

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Taleexi   

Nin-Yaaban;869927 wrote:
Nal Nal Nal. Lights Lights Lights.

I'm not far from its headquarters and going to file a lawsuit on Monday.

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Taleexi   

Nin-Yaaban;869930 wrote:
LoL Sabab? Ma madow dahay? Oo waa lagu arki waayey miyaa?
:)

Ma isku ciyaaraynaynaa, hebelkaa Senegal baa la'iigu yeedhaa :)

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