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Smile / Face Detection 233

face will show up as a green rectangle before you press the shutter release
button halfway. (That’s right – registered faces and unregistered faces
show up the same way on this camera. Previous cameras had registered
faces framed by a magenta square.)
Does it work? If the entire face fills a goodly portion of the scene, and the
lighting is good, and the face is not partially obstructed (like with
sunglasses, hats, etc.) then this feature actually does a good job.

5.31.2 SMILE SHUTTER

Here’s another variation on the same theme. If you can detect that a face is
in the picture, you can also look a little closer and tell if that face is smiling.
And you can tell the camera “Yo! Don’t wait for me to push the button.
Take the picture as soon as you detect someone is smiling!”. And so, with
autofocusing enabled, if you invoke Menu  7  Smile / Face
Detection  Smile Shutter ON, the camera will constantly analyze the
scene and it will not rest until it finds a smiling face and takes the picture.
You can even adjust its sensitivity by using the Left and Right arrows to
choose between Big, Normal, or Slight Smile. This feature can really come
in handy when you’re taking self-portraits.
It’s actually kind of a fun feature to play with. When you enable Smile
Shutter, you see a vertical scale on the left, indicating the strength of the
smiles it detects. And you don’t have to press the shutter release button
halfway. Just point the camera in a general direction of a face. When the
camera sees a face, the vertical scale on the left springs to life, and the
camera starts to focus on any faces it finds. When the “smile strength” is
higher than the currently-set threshold, (that white triangle to the right of
the vertical scale), the camera takes the picture. It will continue doing so
until you disable the feature by turning the camera OFF (when you turn it
on again the function defaults to Face Detection ON – Registered Faces).
Try enabling this feature and shooting some family photos you have
hanging on the wall. It will give you a very good feel for what works and
what doesn’t for this feature.
Smile Detection is hard to do algorithmically (although not as hard as
recognizing a registered face), and so in order for it to work properly you
have to help the camera out a little. The face has to appear rather large in
the picture (it won’t work with a face that’s a mile away, for example). The