Vending machine can spot a youthful face

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Cigarette vending machines in Japan will soon be able to judge their user's age from their appearance. The technology has been developed as an effort to have the machines comply with new laws that, from July, require them to check the age of buyers.

Customers must look into a digital camera attached to the machine. The system will compare facial characteristics, such as wrinkles around the eyes, bone structure and skin sags against a benchmark dataset of more than 100,000 people.

The legal age for smoking in Japan is 20 and the country has about 570,000 tobacco vending machines.

"With face recognition, so long as you have got some change and you are an adult, you can buy cigarettes like before. The problem of minors borrowing (identification) cards to purchase cigarettes could be avoided as well," Hajime Yamamoto, a spokesman for Fujitaka Co, which developed the technology says.

Japan's finance ministry has already given permission to an age-identifying smart card called "taspo" and a system that can read the age from driving licences. It has yet to approve the facial-identification method due to concerns about its accuracy.

Yamamoto said the system could correctly identify about 90% of the users, with the remaining 10% falling into a "grey zone" of "minors that look older, and baby-faced adults".

People not verified by their image would be asked to present their driving licence.

Update: Up until now, the machine is already in operation in Japan