Online Clinic News - Age Recognition on Cigarette Vending Machines

Age Recognition on Cigarette Vending Machines

posted: Tuesday, May 20, 2008 | Categories: Smoking

From July of this year, the Japanese government will have the power to prosecute the manufacturers of cigarette vending machines if it is found that their machines are dispensing cigarettes to anyone under the legal age to smoke. One Japanese vending machine company has responded to this threat in an extremely innovative way. It has developed face recognition technology which will not allow anyone under the age of 20 to purchase products from their machines.

How will the machine do this you might well ask? Well as the company is Japanese don’t expect a low tech response to the problem. The company’s inventors have designed a programme which determines the purchaser’s age by counting the number of wrinkles and sags on their face. Any person that failed this test would be obliged to provide an ID card to continue with their transaction.

Sound farfetched? Well apparently not. The machine’s database will contain records of more than 100,000 people. When someone goes to purchase their packet of cigarettes, the machine will compare their face to these records, counting the number and severity of skin sags, wrinkles and crow’s feet to determine the age of that person.

The machine’s rate of success, say the manufacturers is about 90 percent. The people who fail because they look too young are then asked by the machine to insert either their driving licence or their ID card to determine their actual age.

There are over 570,00 cigarette vending machines in Japan and the country’s department of finance has already given the green light for a system which reads a person’s age off a designated ‘smartcard’ or from driving licences. It has, however, yet to approve the face recognition system owing to doubts over how accurate it could actually be.

Smoking in the under 20s is falling in Japan though a 2004 survey revealed that 14 per cent of boys and 4 percent of girls aged between 17 and 18 smoke on a daily basis.

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