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Really cool techniques (this is the background removal one). I'm curious on how well this would work on hair color detection. My thoughts are that you could run face detection, and since detection almost always (anecdotal) find just the face, not the outline of the face, you could just grab around the face for hair.

Does someone at Lyst have a background in image manipulation? If so, I can't wait to see what else you guys are working on.

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Most of the guys here have more experience with text processing but we are expanding into image processing. I think we could definitely detect hair colour but it isn't that useful for Lyst. Gender identification on the other hand...(watch this space)

I'll be curious about the gender classifier, mostly because I'm working on a statistical aging model for different gender/ethnicities. Keep on posting!

That's a very sensitive area to be heading into. Any assumptions you might try to make will find themselves with counter-examples quite often.

A better direction to move in might be to minimize gender differences as much as possible (although that's hard for marketing to stomach).

I mean, would one try not to recommend pants for girls or skirts for boys (kilts)? It's tricky...

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