Argus: the digital doorman

When you've visited someone in a large apartment or office complex, chances are that a security guard in the lobby granted you access. Perhaps over time, the guard has learned to associate you with the person you plan to visit and immediately notifies that person over the building intercom when you arrive. Argus, named after the vigilant watchman from Greek mythology, is an automated version of such a security guard: a system for automatic visitor identification. We successfully implemented and tested Argus at Just Research. To detect visitors, Argus's digital camera photographs the building entrance at regular intervals, and a motion detection algorithm identifies potential scenes containing visitors. Using a neural-network-based face detector, Argus extracts faces from these images. A memory-based face recognition system examines these faces and attempts to find visually similar matches in its stored database of visitors. An interface agent notifies system users whenever visitors arrive. Users can also provide feedback to Argus in the event of misclassified visitors. Because the face recognizer can learn online, Argus immediately incorporates these corrections into its face recognition data set.