Oki Electric's FaceSensingEngine Used in Pantech's Mobile Phones

Oki Electric Industry announced that it has provided Pantech with FaceSensingEngine (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 in August 1, 2006.

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 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.

"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."