日本智能广告牌“看人下菜碟”(图)

　　日本某电器巨头公司新近研发了一种智能广告牌，能够通过面部识别技术分辨路人的性别和年龄，然后“投其所好”播放不同类型的广告内容，比如，看到女性就会播放香水广告等。据悉，这种智能广告牌目前正在日本的一些购物中心试运行，不过尚未引起太大反响，该公司还计划将其推广到国外市场。不过有隐私保护人士明确指出并不欢迎这样的技术，称没有人会喜欢被广告牌观察和分析。研发方则表示智能广告牌并不保存任何人的图像资料，只会保存对图像的分析数据，并不涉及到个人隐私。

　　A virtual mannequin appearing in the digital billboards。

　　In Steven Spielberg's sci-fi film Minority Report, an interactivead shouts to Tom Cruise's character "John Anderton, you could use aGuinness!" – having identified him by scanning his iris. In Japan,sci-fi prophecy is now becoming reality, with the first digitalbillboards tailored to passing shoppers tried out in malls。

　　Produced by the electronics giant NEC, the ad signage uses facialrecognition software and can identify the shopper's gender (with 85-90%accuracy)， ethnicity and approximate age. With obvious attractions formarketers, they can then be targeted with ads for appropriate products –perfumes for women, for example。

　　Still in the future for now are individual-specific ads as inMinority Report, but the potential is there for the software to measurethe distance between features – a distinctive aspect of our face thatdoes not change with disguises or even surgery – and then find a matchon a database in less than a second. The ad panels have so far causedlittle concern in Japan, where there is less sensitivity to big businesskeeping tabs on citizens; but NEC now plans to introduce them abroad,and western consumers may be more resistant。

　　"We don't expect the billboard to look back at us, but that isexactly what is happening now," says Marc Rotenberg, the director of theElectronic Privacy Information Center (Epic)， a Washington DC-basedresearch centre that aims to protect privacy. "Companies areincreasingly impatient to get to us, and once these practices arecommonplace it will be hard to reverse them."

　　But NEC insists there is little to fear: "As our system does notstore any images – it stores only the analysed results [viewers' age andsex] based on those images – we feel there is no privacy issue."

　　Along with Blade Runner-style 3D ads, Tokyo now also boasts acamera-equipped vending machine that suggests drinks to consumersaccording to their age and gender. Weather conditions and thetemperature are taken into account too。