Face Recognition Technology Not All That Smart

New cigarette vending machines in Japan have a face recognition software that supposedly can tell if a potential customer is an adult or not. Nice idea, but an epic failure. A newspaper put this ability to shame when they tricked the machines by holding up a magazine photo to the mirror/camera sensor. The software thought it was a real person and sold them some smokes. It gets worse. Now a second group used the simple line drawing portraits found on the 1,000-yen and 10,000-yen bills to fool the machine.

Pink Tentacle explains:

On July 1 — the day that Japan’s cigarette vending machine age-verification system was rolled out nationwide — Sankei reporters in Tokyo went out in search of machines equipped with age-verification cameras. They found that these machines treated them as adults and allowed them to purchase cigarettes when they showed the portrait of Yukichi Fukuzawa (the renaissance man and Keio University founder who appears on the 10,000-yen note) to the vending machine’s camera-embedded mirror. The machines also reportedly sold cigarettes to the portrait of Hideyo Noguchi (the notable bacteriologist who discoveredcontributed to the understanding of syphilis), which appears on the 1,000-yen note.

[via Pink Tentacle]