Eigenfaces Online Service 149
nordicfrost writes "At Norways largest online newspaper, they're doing the beta test of an Eigenface service. In short, it takes a portrait picture, treats it with some filters and analyzes the vectors in it. This is used for crimestopping and generic Big Brother activities. In this database, however, your mug is compared with celebrites to find which one that matches you the most. I match, among others, Brad Garrett. This site is pretty self-explaining, upload a portrait pic of yourself taken right in front of your face, closely cropped to the face and use the up arrow to see your top ten list of celebrity matches. You have to agree to some terms first, like giving permission to use your pic in promotions and other stuff and not to upload indecent stuff."
William Gibson novel (Score:5, Interesting)
Avoiding recognition: Gaming the system (Score:5, Interesting)
But I wonder if people can game this system to make themselves unrecognizable. For example, a member of the tin-foil hat brigade might submit multiple mugshots of themselves under mutliple assumed identities. By using slight variations in facial expression, makeup, lighting, and camera angle they would make the system think that a large fraction of the population "looks like" the person who seeks anonymity. The system would then have a hard time identifying the tin-foil hat wearer because he/she matches so many people in the test data.
Anyone can make themselves "look average" if they can bias the dataset that defines the average.
If only.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Medical application (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ima Gunna (Test it)! (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's be honest for a second... (Score:2, Interesting)
My use for this (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Medical application (Score:1, Interesting)
I've worked in neuropsychology and neurology, and there's this phenomenon that often occurs where you meet a patient, and know they're dysmorphic in an identifiable way, but can't quite place what's different about them. These individuals often go through years, if not decades, of unsuccessful genetic testing to try to match them with a syndrome.
Perhaps your suggestion could help in such cases. More generally, it might improve research, by allowing for quantification of features more accurately. Then you could say with some precision that feature X tends to be associated with gene Y. This might actually lead to a revolution in the way that neurogenetic syndromes are conceived of and neurodevelopmental trajectories are modeled.
Having said that, I'm not sure that an eigen decomposition approach is the most effective. As I understand it, this method is based on a decomposition of a covariance matrix, and is therefore essentially limited to breaking down features into linear components. It only models through the second moment of a distribution (means and variances).
My guess is that more accurate results could be obtained by using something that models statistical dependencies in general, rather than just covariances. This could be done by using independent components analysis [cis.hut.fi], for example, rather than principle components analysis.
An extended use (Score:2, Interesting)
Someone's editing wikepedia again..., (Score:3, Interesting)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Eigenfaces are eigenvectors in the high-dimensional vector space of possible faces of human beings. These eigenvectors are used in the computer vision problem of human face recognition.
Some eigenfaces.
Eigenfaces also are linked to the slashdotting of many sites.
jaj
Egads! Scary stuff.... (Score:2, Interesting)