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The New York Times published an article about toilet paper theft and the use of technology to prevent it:
The toilet paper thieves of the Temple of Heaven Park were an elusive bunch.
They looked like most park visitors, practicing tai chi, dancing in the courtyards and stopping to take in the scent of ancient cypress and juniper trees. But hidden in their oversize shopping bags and backpacks was a secret: sheet upon sheet of crumpled toilet paper, plucked surreptitiously from public restrooms.
Now the authorities in Beijing are fighting back, going so far as to install high-tech toilet paper dispensers equipped with facial recognition software in several restrooms.
Before entering restrooms in the park, visitors must now stare into a computer mounted on the wall for three seconds before a machine dispenses a sheet of toilet paper, precisely two feet in length. If visitors require more, they are out of luck. The machine will not dispense a second roll to the same person for nine minutes.
This seems to be too funny to be real, but the article has an animated GIF that demonstrates this device's operation.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by varsix on Tuesday March 21 2017, @04:32AM (6 children)
What happens if you show the camera a picture of someone else's face? What if you have a bag of people's pictures with you?
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday March 21 2017, @06:46AM (1 child)
Ahhh... finally a use for old political campaign posters....
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday March 21 2017, @10:10PM
If you're a known politician, you get triple the amount.
You think it's a privilege scheme, when in fact it's engineers hinting you're full of...
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday March 21 2017, @01:57PM (2 children)
I have a solution for that problem.
Don't use facial recognition. The toilets should have computerized recognition of the other end of the human anatomy.
It is far less likely that you have this kind of picture of another person in order to steal toilet paper by showing another person's picture.
The other advantage of this is TP is not even dispensed unless you actually sat on the toilet to be recognized by the system first.
The AI should use supervised learning. Human operators will look at all of the training data set of photos and signify which photos are are positives to provide feedback for the learning. These jobs would increase employment.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 21 2017, @03:19PM
Don't use facial recognition. The toilets should have computerized recognition of the other end of the human anatomy.
Ahhh... finally a use for old goatse links....
(with apologies to anubi [soylentnews.org])
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday March 21 2017, @09:52PM
It is far less likely that you have this kind of picture of another person in order to steal toilet paper by showing another person's picture.
Oh to be so young and innocent again. I think there's a whole subreddit for that kind of picture. But if you didn't know that, you probably shouldn't go there until you're older.
Now the real hack would be pranking my friends and coworkers and knowing that they're going to use those, um, interesting image collections, I'd purposefully go there and "use up" all the hot 10/10 pictures and then flush the TP just to force them to use pictures of, you know, blown out medical conditions, really ugly people, you get the idea. Just to mess with my "buddies". Because I know they'd be doing the same thing to me for a laugh.
"You bastards know I went to taco bell for dinner last night and you're making be look up goatse today just to get some TP? Fuuuuuu...." (note to kids, do not look up goatse. When you gaze into the goatse, the goatse gazes back into you...)
The AI should use supervised learning. Human operators
Oh god the horror the horror... You can imagine the shock pix people are going to hold up to the screen when they really need to wipe and its the only way they can get TP. Those human trainers are going to need serious psychological counseling. "Wait, is that a bowling ball up there? he's earned his TP!"
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday March 21 2017, @09:42PM
... someone else's face ... what if you have a bag ...
A bag of faces sounds like a creepypasta story. Hmm how about a book instead of a bag... a book of faces... facebook?
Personally I think it would be funny to try and frame your friends and coworkers by holding up their linkedin/facebook picture to get TP such that they are locked out of TP for awhile. "Damnnit VLM you used my picture you son of a ... now I gotta find someone elses picture" Union activists will make sure the CEO never gets to wipe.
Another option which I think would be hilarious if a human periodically checks the scanned photos, I'd go on 4chan or reddit and show pr0n pix to the camera. I'm pretty sure theres a whole subreddit just for facials making this whole issue rather trivial.
One option to consider is shock pix. Or memes. I can totally imagine getting drunk and saying stuff in the stall like "Tub girl commands you, squirt out some more tp or else you're not gonna like the cleanup" "Jean Luc Picard says, number two, make it so" "help me obi wan kenobi, I need TP!" "hal, open the toilet paper bay door, hal" I wonder if pedo bear would recognize as a face and issue TP.
Imagine the fivver. "For $5 I'll draw you 10 hand drawn faces guaranteed to get you TP"