Unless you are some pro photographer, you’ve probably seen those dreadful red-eye effects in some of your pictures taken with flash. Because of the intensity of most camera flashes, any reflection off the retina of the subjects’ eyes shows up as red-eyes in the resulting picture.

So what does it has to do with gauging a person’s age? Because as people age, the muscles in their eyes weaken, resulting in less effective dilation of the eyes in response to changing light conditions. With this fact, Andrew Gallagher, senior research scientist at Eastman Kodak, has developed a system to accurately gauge a person’s age.

“We found that the features related to the red eye artifact, the pupil dilation, are very good features to tell us how old someone is,” said Gallagher.

But Gallagher will not stop at that. By incorporating other information such as the distance between each eye (have you noticed that as you age, the distance between your two eyes grows), amount of hair and wrinkles, the system could achieve an even higher accuracy.

At this time, Gallagher’s system is capable of categorizing a person into various age groups such as babies, teenagers and adults.

This technology could mean a major step forward in digital photo recognition software, with age searching looking very promising.

Give a choice, how would you integrate this technology into our existing ones?