Omron Demos Facial Recognition Technology

Ceatec: Omron's facial recognition technology could be used by a company to train its employees how to smile.

Do you find your employees not smiling when greeting customers? Japanese component maker Omron Corp.'s Okao Vision family of facial-recognition products can help.

Omron showed off at this week's Ceatec exhibition in Japan the capabilities of its Okao Vision technology that recognizes when a person is smiling, and can evaluate how big their grin is. The technology can be used in a digital camera to sense when photo subjects are smiling and ready for their picture to be taken, said James Seddon, a spokesman for the company.

The smile-evaluation technology, which can monitor multiple faces in the same image, could be used by a company to train its employees how to smile, he said.