Der Spiegel reports of another “Veiled Woman Removed From Bus in Denmark“:
“For Amina Farah Suleiman, it was the fourth time in a few months that she has been kicked off a bus in the harbor city of Odense. Her Islamic niqab only had a small opening for the eyes, and the driver refused to accept her season ticket, saying he could not see who she was.”
Provided it’s not simply a thinly-veiled case of discrimination (which it probably is), there are, as a matter of fact, engineers working on the problem. A paper presented at the 2007 Machine Vision conference, entitled “A study on partial face recognition of eye region“, described one possible method for scanning the region around the eyes instead of the face, to avoid just these kinds of problems.
In this preliminary study, we have investigated the human eye as an important part of face for personal authentication under certain restricted circumstances related to face occlusion, individual privacy concerns and religious practices.
Instead of generating incendiary “culture clashes” where there are none — by, for instance, subjecting people to processes that have failed to take them into account – we should be arguing over how best to redesign the process for the people.
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