Women who’re not comfortable revealing their age should stay miles away from University of Illinois-developed computer software that reveals a person’s age just like humans do—by looking at his or her face.
The software, developed at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, could analyse an image of your face to verify your identity or run a commercial according to your interest.
“Age measurement is very difficult. If you use the face to estimate age we can really get the apparent age, or how old a person looks,” Discovery News quoted Thomas Huang, the lead developer, as saying.
For developing the software, the researchers trained their computer algorithm using 1,600 different people with five pictures of each person, for a total of 8,000 images.
The age of the people in the pictures ranged from one year to 93 years old.
While the computer was not told what to look for, it still searched the faces and used its own software to determine which features best determined the person’s apparent age.
One of the features the computer took into account was gray scale— it saw how dark or how light each pixel was compared to other pixels, and then guesses the apparent age of the individual.
