Face-Tracking Technology

Face-Tracking Technology for Cell Phones

Tired of taking pictures of your friends with your camera phone, only to find you've captured a dark blob of nothing? No longer just reserved for digital still cameras, face-detection technology has arrived for cell phones. Yesterday, FotoNation unveiled Face Tracker, the world's first face-detection and tracking technology for camera phones.

Face Tracker "detects the presence and position of a subject's face at up to 30 frames per second during image capture, enabling the optimal setting of exposure, focus and color balance," according to the press release. An online demo shows many of the aforementioned attributes, and also the simultaneous tracking of two faces at once. It would be interesting to see the phone track the eight faces that FotoNation says the technology is capable of.

FotoNation Face Tracker is platform-independent and scales in performance according to the power of the processor used in the device. It can run on both Symbian Series 60 3rd edition OS and Windows Mobile 5.0.

The technology is available now for licensing; it's only a matter of time before poorly exposed camera-phone images of people are a thing of the past.