• HiMPACT™
• Face Location and Tracking
• Scanner Reproduction
• Battery Optimization

Advanced Face Tracking Technology

Each day PDAs, cell phones, and computers represent a larger piece of what we do. Increasingly, these tools are incorporating video capability to allow them to be even more useful. There has also been a paradigm shift in how we view our personal and national security over the past few years. Faces in a crowd and where they are going are, at times, of key interest.

Sharp Technology Ventures is offering an advanced face tracking technology that allows real-time location and tracking of faces at video rates, which can be used in a multitude of applications. These are broad in scope and include areas such as

• security and surveillance
• personal real-time video communication
• advanced human-computer interface
• digital libraries
• object-based video coding

The advanced face tracking technology can reduce transmission data requirements, decrease image shake, and provide higher quality digital data streams in mobile video communication applications. It can lock onto the main face in the image and ignore background interference; this makes for a very desirable feature in PDAs and mobile videophones. It has applications in smart human/computer interaction. The technology can be used as a front end for recognition programs that recognize different sets of facial expressions,e.g.; puzzled or sad, which could lead a computer to automatically offer a help menu, for example. It can also be used as a precursor and improvement to face recognition programs, thus incorporating the ability to lock on and track a given person in real time.

IP Summary
This technology is supported by 3 U.S. patents. The most recent year of issue is 2002.