Smart Ads
['Smart' ads: targeted to who's watching the screen -- Newsday.com]
Cameras and televisions can be combined to customize smart advertisements. The cameras identify gender (with around a 85% accuracy) and then show the appropriate advertising – “That could mean razor ads for men, cosmetics ads for women and video-game ads for teens.”
This technology relies on facial recognition / face tracking software. The vendors mentioned are TruMedia and Quividi.
Here is a snippet about how the technology works:
In general, the tracking systems work like this: A sensor or camera in or near the screen identifies viewers’ faces by picking up shapes, colors and the relative speed of movement. The concept is similar to the way consumer cameras now can automatically make sure faces are in focus.
When the ad system pinpoints a face, it compares shapes and patterns to faces that are already identified in a database as male or female. That lets the system predict the person’s gender almost immediately.
The most important features seem to be cheekbones, fullness of lips and the gap between the eyebrows,” said Paolo Prandoni, chief scientific officer of Quividi, a French company that is another player in face-tracking technology. Others include Studio IMC Inc. in New York.
The companies say their systems have become adept at determining a viewer’s gender, but age is trickier: The software can categorize age only in broad ranges – teens, younger to middle-aged folks and seniors. There’s moderate demand for ads based on ethnic information, but the companies acknowledge that determining ethnicity is more challenging than figuring out gender and age range.
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