UK School Introduces Facial Recognition Technology

Written on 6th March 2009                                                                                                              6 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.

A Cambridge school has abandoned standard morning registration in favour of a facial recognition system.

City of Ely Community College will now scan Sixth-formers faces as they enter and leave the school every day. The scanning apparently, developed by Aurora, takes just 1.5 seconds and uses infra-red light to match their features with information stored on the system.

Scott Preston, vice-chairman of the school, told Cambridge News :

The system is working really well – sixth-formers and staff are pleased with the efficiency of it.  Only today (Thursday, 05 March) we had a fire alarm test and the administration staff were able to quickly and effectively print data off from the system showing who was on site.

The system apparently is not only of benefit to security but will also save teachers about an hour and a half a day.

Education, facial recognition, scanning, school

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Tag your friends’ faces in videos with VideoFriends, Viewdle’s Facebook app

Written on 28th August 2008                                                                                                              0 COMMENTS
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer

Viewdle, the face-detection oriented video search technology company, has touched base with us to announce the alpha release of VideoFriends, a Facebook app which helps you organize your videos with extensive tagging and sharing utilities.

So far, the only platform that’s supported is YouTube, although the company promises that they “will add support for many more mobile broadcast and upload applications soon”.

Since Viewdle is all about facial recognition, I assume that the app is just a tool for them to enlarge their index and improve their automated detection skills.

Viewdle recently raised an undisclosed round of funding from KIT Capital, a Dubai-based digital media investment group. One of the media partners currently testing their technology platform is Reuters.

(Full disclosure: Viewdle was last year’s winner of the Startup Rally at Plugg, a web conference I organize.)

facebook, Facebook app, facial recognition, Video Interview, video search, VideoFriends, Viewdle

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