Face recognition on a set top box would be in my top 5 must haves. How many times has someone said - who is that? Haven't I seen them in another movie? A facial recognition program with a link to imdb would be great. Better yet for cable operators, how about facial recognition with a link to your VoD offering? The work could be offloaded to a server from the set top box due to the compute involved.
There is a darker side to facial recognition on set top boxes. Imagine a system where a camera is attached to your STB and the STB wathces you - 24 hours. It switches on the TV when you sit down and switches off when you leave. The menu is personalised to you or whoever comes into the room and of course, the operator gets to know a lot more about your watching habits than you might like. All of this is a lot closer than you might think.
This IEEE paper, from 2007, proposes such a system. And Comcast may well be considering it for real.
About Me
- Chris Thornborrow
- Graphics guy who moved into digital TV 9 years ago. My interests lie in graphics and user interfaces for DTV. I am the inventor of EGG, a pseudo-3D graphics library for set top boxes with no 3D hardware. Opinions expressed on this blog are mine, not those of my employer Alticast.
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