Tokyo, Japan, August 24 2006 – Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd. (TSE: 6703) today announced that it has provided Pantech Co., Ltd., a major mobile phone company in South Korea, with FaceSensingEnginge™ (FSE), Oki’s face image processing middleware to be used in their mobile phones. FSE is embedded into Pantech’s SKY brand mobile phone, “SKY IM-R100,” that was launched on August 1, 2006.
“Our SKY brand mobile phones are known for their abundant functions using the camera, and we have been looking for an image processing technology that utilizes the camera as a human interface as well as for entertainment,” said E.J.Lee, General Manager, Product Planning, at Pantech. “Oki’s FSE was a perfect solution as it enables us to offer various solutions using the camera. What is amazing about FSE is that it can be embedded into a phone with limited CPU and memory but still provide high-speed image processing.”
SKY IM-R100 is Pantech’s first mobile phone to be equipped with Oki’s FSE. When taking a picture, the FSE automatically controls the camera direction based on the facial feature tracking function, and always adjusts the face to the middle of the screen. In addition, FSE can synthesize images in real-time synchronized to facial movements, and can save the result as a photo using the image synthesis function.
The FSE achieves one of the fastest processing times in the industry for face detection, facial feature detection and tracking functions. It detects facial features in 115msec, a ARM9 200MHz-level processing performance, and tracks facial feature tracking in 35msec. Thus, it best suits applications that require quick response. The FSE includes a processing algorithm that is not easily affected by brightness, thus enabling users to use it in various situations whether indoors or outdoors. Oki’s FSE provides facial recognition by extracting the amount of personal characteristics of the face image and comparing and verifying them to previously registered data.
“We are excited to provide our FSE to Pantech’s SKY brand mobile phones, a sophisticated and popular mobile phone,” said Teruo Iijima, General Manager of Business Incubation Division at Oki Electric. “By combining libraries, such as Oki’s FaceCommunicator®- E2, with FSE, Oki can provide a variety of solutions. Based on the track record with Pantech, we will continue to provide our FSE-based solutions to mobile phone market as well as the entertainment and other embedded systems markets.”
