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Comment by flimflamm | Hacker News Reader

Should police collect iPhones away in those cities where face recognition is banned?

You should also collect Sony Alpha cameras too. Many of them have a preferential focus feature which uses face recognition.

You add up to five faces, prioritized, and it focuses to them if it recognizes in the crowd of people.

TIL, and this sounds actually rather useful. Do you have information on which ones would support that? Especially in the range a curious hacker (who else is HN for?) would be interested in.

It's especially useful in crowd gatherings, group photos and such. I think it's rather designed for concerts, weddings, etc.

My A7-III has it. Since it uses Eye-AF and Face-AF pipelines (it generates a face model from the photo you take for that feature only), it needs AI autofocus stack inside the camera. A7-C should have it, maybe latest APS-C lines (6600 for example) have it.

Sony's AF tech is insane. Point to a person with sunglasses, and it marks the eye instantaneously. What the actual sorcery?

Well the goal is to recognize a face, not to match a specific face to a specific person. So you can train an AF model to to center focus on the center of the sunglasses. Even with the 'track these specific faces' features, since your still not trying to unique identify someone, the model can latch on to generic features like "red sunglasses, brown skin, surgical mask & this general shape".

Wow - didn't know about this preferential focus feature. Sounds extremely useful...

Face detection (that is, only identifying a face in a picture) is not face recognition (identifying the person behind the face).

That depends what the law says. Some of the pressure here is to stop the police themselves from using the tech, I wouldn’t know if any given law prevents personal use.

It’s a government ban. Not a generalised ban.

Sorry, I am out side of US. What's the difference?

Government ban means banned for use by government officials/entities. So it doesn't really apply to the general public or corporations(Unless the corporation specifically has a contract with the same requirements to do work on behalf of the government)

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