US Patent Issued to NEC on May 27 for "Familiarity degree estimation apparatus, familiarity degree estimation method, and recording medium" (Japanese Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,314,967, issued on May 27, was assigned to NEC Corp. (Tokyo).

"Familiarity degree estimation apparatus, familiarity degree estimation method, and recording medium" was invented by Azusa Furukawa (Tokyo), Kan Arai (Tokyo), Kei Shibuya (Tokyo), Hiroshi Hashimoto (Tokyo), Ken Hanazawa (Tokyo) and Makiko Akiguchi (Tokyo).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "In a familiarity degree estimation apparatus, a first video process unit calculates a time while a hand being viewed, which is a time when a customer is viewing the hand. A second video process unit calculates a time while an item being held, which is a time when the customer is holding an item....