Say Cheese: New Tech Knows When You're Smiling

Great Aunt Elsie will never have that disapproving frown on her face again, at least not in the family reunion photo shot. FotoNation is the company behind digital photography technologies like red-eye reduction and face tracking. Its software is built into many of the top consumer digital cameras.

FotoNation's FaceTracker looks for faces in a photo and focuses the camera on them. SmileCheck, a new technology to make sure the folks in your photo all look happy, is an extension of FaceTracker. When you push the camera's shutter button down halfway to properly focus and frame your photo, SmileCheck first looks for faces in the scene. Once faces are detected, the software looks for facial features associated with smiles. Called the Smile Shutter, the photo isn't snapped until every person in the shot is smiling. Imagine weeding out the "nobody is going to make me smile" kid from the class photo.

You can see a demonstration of the technology at FotoNation.com. It's being demonstrated at PMA—a photo marketing show being held in Orlando at the end of the month and it's sure to make a bunch of group photo enthusiasts "smile."