Now, a facial scanner software that helps fight porn

Sydney, Jan 23: Scientists at Melbourne's Deakin University have developed a new technique that can stop minors from accessing online adult content by estimating their age.

The scanner, called "Ages", would automatically estimate a person's age using complex mathematics by examining facial features.

Professor Kate Smith-Miles, head of the University's School of Engineering and Information Technology and PhD student Xin Geng, said that their methods were more effective in estimating someone's age than existing technologies.

"While recognition of most facial variations - such as identity, expression and gender - has been extensively studied, automatic age estimation has rarely been explored," News.com.au quoted Prof Smith-Miles, as saying

"In extensive experiments of over 2000 faces, our method outperformed the existing approaches.

"(It) even outperformed human perception of age estimates when humans were given only the same tightly cropped face images to view as those fed into our algorithm," she added.

The researchers revealed that the age estimation software would stop young Internet users accessing pornography, provide an alternative to fingerprint scanning and help police in the identification of suspects.

However, Prof Smith-Miles said the technique has not yet been perfected.

Aging presents several unique characteristics that make age estimation a challenging task.

ANI