From New Scientist:
Red-eye age checker
This could be bad news for under-age drinkers and anyone else trying to lie about their age.
Camera maker Kodak is adapting the technology used to automatically correct flash-induced "red-eye" in digital images to determine a person's age. A patent filed by researchers from the company's labs in Rochester, New York, suggests the technique could provide a quick and easy way to check someone's date of birth.
Red-eye is the effect seen when a person's open pupils allow a camera's flash light to be reflected off their retinas. Red eye correction software analyses a picture, looking for a pair of red dots in the centre of a face, and automatically dulls them to remove the effect.
Kodak's patent mentions previous research suggesting a correlation between age and the way pupils react to light. As a person gets older, their pupils have greater difficulty widening to cope with dim light, it says.
The company suggests that an age-verification system could take mug shots of a person from a set distance in controlled lighting, using a flash. Software would then measure the size of their red-eye dots to determine how wide their pupils are and make an estimate of their age.
Although the patent doesn't say how accurate the system could be it suggests that accuracy could be boosted by automatically looking for wrinkles and grey hair in an image as well. Well, just don't point that thing at me…
Read the full patent, here:
Kodak Patent on Redeye Age Guessing
