Face Recognition

There is a new "face" in face recognition and this could be in the form of a dot. This is what Associate Professor Ajmal Mian from the University of Western Australia is working on.

Associate Professor Ajmal Mian is an expert in face recognition and has been in the field for 8 years. His new research study is focused on utilizing satellite technology in order to identify facial features that are located under the skin.

There is also a possibility that people who utilized cosmetic surgery to alter their face could be recognized through the use of this technology.

He further explained his research stating that "multi-spectral imaging can be used to measure light reflected off a face at hundreds of discrete wavelengths in the visible spectrum and beyond".

"Recognition based on sets of facial images from surveillance cameras, YouTube videos, Google Images or personal photo albums is more accurate because they contain more information," he said.

Face recognition technology is being used increasingly for computer log-ons, identity checks and surveillance, and is a boom industry around the world.

"It can be used in any kind of machine such as mobile phones, computers and robots. It's the most user-friendly way to authenticate someone and is now so sophisticated that machines can identify a face no matter what the expression.

"Humans are very good at finding a familiar face in a crowd but less able to identify someone they may have seen only once. This is where machines outperform people because they can memorise images and never tire of matching them to faces in a crowd."

Associate Professor Ajmal said face recognition technology was better than fingerprinting because it didn't require special equipment or an expert to verify the results.

Also, any part of a face could be used, and many images of a person's face - including different expressions and poses - could be merged to make a composite image which was more meaningful to the machine.

"Humans can recognise a person regardless of whether they're laughing, frowning, crying or sleeping. Machines may soon be able to do the same."

Associate Professor Mian is the only West Australian to have won the Australasian Distinguished Dissertation Award from CORE (The Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia).

He has won two prestigious national fellowships: the Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Australian Research Fellowship, and has written more than 50 high-impact papers including more than 30 as first author.

NASA - Oblique View of Borrego Fault

This 3-D airborne light detection and ranging (lidar) oblique view of the Borrego Fault, taken from the post-earthquake topographic survey, shows a wide zone of numerous small faults that slice the ground surface and offset the floor of a desert wash surrounding the main fault. 

The various colours in the landscape represent elevation changes during the earthquake. Image generated in Crusta (keckcaves.org) with 2x vertical exaggeration.

NPL to make reflected light measurements

A researcher from NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), the national measurement institute of the USA, recently visited the UK to utilise NPL's world-leading facilities for measuring the optical properties of materials, and specifically for measuring reflectance of samples in the infrared.

Out of all the measurement institutes around the world, NPL is capable of making these measurements over the widest range of infrared wavelengths.

In the USA, NIST is developing a fibre-coupled cryogenic radiometer that links optical fibre power measurements directly to fundamental electrical units at the 10 nW power level.

Such a device could have a role in telecommunications, medical devices and other industries that require ultra low power calibrations.

Cryogenic radiometry was first developed at NPL. It works by absorbing optical power which causes a temperature rise in the absorber.

The amount of electrical power needed to induce the same temperature rise is then measured. To make the most accurate measurements, the device needs to employ a surface that absorbs the largest amount of optical energy possible, and reflects the least.

A coating of carbon nanotubes, arranged so that they stand vertically on the surface like a forest of trees, provide this surface.

The arrangement forms the lowest reflective, or darkest, surface known to man and only NPL's facilities are capable of making the required measurements of reflected infrared light to test it.

Two facilities were used at NPL: the first, based on a grating spectrometer and integrating sphere, covers the range of the electromagnetic spectrum from visible light to a wavelength of 2.5 µm; and the second facility uses a Fourier transform spectrometer and reflecting hemisphere to cover the range from 2.5 µm to 50 µm.

The measurements made during this project represent the first ever reflectance measurements of materials with reflectance less than 1% in the 15–50 µm region and confirm that the NIST carbon nanotube coatings have the lowest known reflectance in the infrared region.

NPL and NIST have collaborated since 2003 to assess the benefits to the performance of thermal detectors obtained by using carbon nanotube coatings, and half a dozen papers have been jointly authored reporting those findings.

The current work has expanded NPL's collaboration with NIST and is described in a paper submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

More on NPL's work on Optical Radiation and Photonics

More on NPL's work on Reflected Light

For further information, please contact Christopher Chunnilall or Theo Theocharous

Magic Ink: Now available for full colour Printing

Borrowing an idea from nature could lead to technology capable of producing full-colour A4 prints in a fraction of a second, according to South Korean engineers.

Many insects and birds owe their bright colours to the interaction of light with finely-patterned surface textures, rather than relying on pigments. The iridescent colours of a peacock's tail are largely a result of the interaction of light with just one biological material – melanin rods.

Engineers have long experimented with replicating these so-called structural colours in synthetic materials, and now Sunghoon Kwon's team at Seoul National University in South Korea has managed it.

Their M-Ink can be used to produce any colour in the visible spectrum and could lead to a new method of cheap and fast full-colour printing, Kwon says.

Just add nanoparticles

M-Ink contains three ingredients: magnetic nanoparticles 100 to 200 nanometres across, a solvation liquid, and a resin.

The nanoparticles disperse throughout the resin, giving the ink a brown appearance. But when an external magnetic field is applied, the nanoparticles immediately snap to the magnetic field lines, forming chain-like structures.

The regularly-spaced nanoparticle chains interfere with incoming light, so that the light reflected from the surface is of a particular colour. Adjusting the magnetic field strength shifts the spacing of the field lines and changes the colour, says Kwon.