Fingerprint Recognition

Fingerprint recognition was one of the first forms of biometric authentication techniques developed. Biometric authentication refers to the process of identifying humans by their natural traits. This can include fingerprints, face, voice, iris etc. When you want machines to authenticate a particular person, you choose a feature of that person which he cannot control. Fingerprints are still widely used in criminal investigations and in certain other domains where security is required. Have you ever wondered if fingerprints are distinct enough to be used to identify a person? How do they match fingerprints?   Continue reading “Fingerprint Recognition”

How Do We Recognize Objects?

Look around and you will see a lot of day to day objects. You recognize them almost instantaneously and involuntarily. You don’t have to wait for a few minutes after looking at a table to understand that it is in fact a table. Machines, on the other hand, find it very difficult to do this task. People have been working for decades to find a solution to this problem, but they have only been able to achieve an accuracy of around 65%. Why is it so hard for machines to recognize and categorize objects like humans? What’s so difficult here? We do it everyday and we get it right almost every single time. What’s the missing link? This is actually the holy grail of computer vision!   Continue reading “How Do We Recognize Objects?”

Connecting With Kinect

If you haven’t experienced Kinect yet, do yourself a favor and just go do it! For people who have just landed on earth, Kinect is a motion sensing device for Microsoft XBox 360 video game console. You can check out the video here. Instead of using buttons or controllers to play video games, this device enables you to use your body. Your movements will be captured and the video game character will move accordingly. When Kinect first came out in 2009, it took the world by storm! How is it possible to capture our body movements so accurately without using any wires? How does it recognize our gestures?   Continue reading “Connecting With Kinect”

Peeking Into The Third Dimension With 3D Glasses

Instead of directly explaining it, I will take a different route this time. Let’s take a look at this conversation between Walter and Michael. In case you are not familiar with them, Walter is a mathematician and Michael is his friend who refuses to acknowledge that humans need complex mathematical models. This attitude of Michael doesn’t sit well with Walter and hence they are constantly at loggerheads over this issue. They were once walking along and they came across a multiplex.   Continue reading “Peeking Into The Third Dimension With 3D Glasses”

Looking Into The Future With Google Glass

Unless you shut down all your gadgets and hid yourself in a dark alley with absolutely no connection to the rest of the world, you would have heard that the Google I/O conference started on June 27. It is one of the most exciting events in the realm of tech innovation. Google came up with a couple of new devices – A 7-inch Android Jelly Bean tablet called Nexus 7 and a social media streaming device called Nexus Q. But that’s not what this blog post is about. I want to talk about the insanely cool Google Glass demo that they presented in the conference. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can see it here. This reminded all of us why we love and adore Google. The technology falls in the category of Wearable Computing. When they started it out a few years ago, it sounded very futuristic, but not anymore. It’s here and we just saw it!   Continue reading “Looking Into The Future With Google Glass”