'Shore' Facial Analysis App Lets Google Glass Analyse Your Emotions

Google Glass Can Now Analyse Your Emotions
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Because Google Glass wasn't already creepy enough, somebody has built an app for the device which can read your emotions.

The reasearch-led app was developed by scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Germany.

The ideas is to integrate facial recognition technology into Google Glass, but to focus not on recognising identity but other key visual information - like a person's age, gender and emotions.

The tech is called the Sophisticated High-speed Object Recognition Engine (SHORE) and is able to tell how happy, sad, angry or surprised a person is, and make guesses at their sex and rough age.

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Franhofer said:

"The foundation of the versatile SHORE™ solution lies in our extensive experience with detection and analysis technologies and a large database for machine learning. The technology is "trained" by accessing a database of more than 10,000 annotated faces. In combination with the structure-based features and learning algorithms, we can train so-called models that boast extremely high recognition rates."

It is not thought that the app is currently heading for a public release - but it could have useful applications. Franhofer said people on the autism spectrum could use it to more easily integrate into social situations, for instance, or to help the blind pick up on visual social cues through an audio implementation of the idea.