Government spies won't need X-rays to get their kicks. Image: CC/Earl

Security guards, TSA workers, cops, and the pervs amongst them, will soon be able to ogle people through their clothes, without the need to push them through an x-ray machine.

A Brown University computer model can infer a person’s physical shape from the way their clothes hang about them.

The method will be useful for detecting weapons-toting enemies of the state, the Brown developers suggested. They also mention unspecified potential uses for “personal fitness, retail apparel and computer games.”

The U.S. Office of Naval Research and Intel, and a Rhode Island technology consortium paid for the new software.

We consequently combine constraints across pose to more accurately estimate 3D body shape in the presence of occluding clothing. Finally we use the recovered 3D shape to estimate the gender of subjects and then employ gender specific body models to refine our shape estimates. Results on a novel database of thousands of images of clothed and “naked” subjects, as well as sequences from the HumanEva dataset, suggest the method may be accurate enough for biometric shape analysis in video.

via ECCV 1564