Presently, there are approximately 6.3 billion people living in the world. That figure includes men and women and people of different ages from babies to the aged. OKAO Vision's performance has already reached the level of being able to automatically estimate attributes of people such as gender and age from images of many different faces around the world.

Suppose an elderly person comes to a bank to make a money transfer. The person tries to operate the touch panel of the ATM but looks puzzled because the displayed characters are very small and hard to read What if the people-friendly ATM could estimate the person's age from the face picture recorded with the built-in camera, then automatically enlarge the characters for display? How about a PC that automatically simplifies instructions when it detects that an elementary student is using it? OMRON believes that if truly people-friendly machines are to be created, it is essential that machines understand the user by detecting the person's face and retrieving information from it.

Based on this belief, OMRON has developed an advanced, world's-first technology for estimating facial attributes. This innovative technology can estimate a person's gender and age from a facial image, and it takes a mere second for estimation. The technology makes full use of OMRON's accumulated expertise in recognizing different parts of a face, as well as its database containing a huge volume of facial image data gathered from around the world and supported by ongoing research.

ATM capable of altering its display to match the user's estimated age.

In addition to identifying a person and determining the person's gender and age, a machine can even understand the current emotional or physical state of the person with face sensing technology.

A home-use robot now being developed will be able to distinguish each member of the family with a vision sensor and interact with each in a different way. It may even become possible for the robot to become a good listener during family chats or take care of a person if that person looks tired or ill. To make these possibilities a reality, the robot must be able to recognize a particular person's conditions from his or her facial image. OMRON is currently working on the development of this facial condition estimation technology for OKAO Vision. Once perfected, this technology can be used in a variety of ways, such as a car that detects when a driver is dozing off at the wheel and triggers an alarm or recommends that the driver take a rest.

A robot that acts in a way suitable for each member of the family.

Compact Size, High Speed Offer Extraordinary Potential

Return to Vision Sensing Top