Skulls Gain Virtual Faces

rw2 writes "Totally cool, The guys at Max Planck Institute for Computer Science have developed a way to reconstruct a persons appearence when a skull is found. When police find a skull and want to know what its owner looked like, they generally use artists who reconstruct the face by building up layers of clay over the skull."

Comments

Pretty neat

[stratjakt]

They've been doing this on every discovery channel special on mummies I've seen for the last year.

Most recently the Nefertiti one that I watched just the other night.

Re:Pretty neat

[Smallpond]

Most earlier reconstructions are done by artists with clay. On Nova about 6 years ago they showed how to build up from a skull.

1. Glue on pencil erasers to set the skin thickness
2. Cover with modeling clay to make the features using the erasers as a guide.
3. ???

You know the rest.

Soviet Mobs?

[SHEENmaster]

Doesn't the Russian Mafia use base solutions to desolve "enemies", letting their flesh run down the drain, leaving only bones?

The real reason is to identify McBride's remains after his speech at Defcon.

Jaw bone lifestyle

[swtaarrs]

This sounds interesting, but sometimes this reconstruction thing can be taken way too far. I saw a special on either the Discovery Channel or TLC where they found half of a lower jaw bone. From this, they reconstructed the rest of the jaw. Then they reconstructed the rest of the face and head. Then they figured out his eating habits. Then from those eating habits they figured out the whole lifestyle of this guy, from only his jaw bone.... It was interesting but didn't seem very believable.

Not Scientific

[lawpoop]

We covered facial reconstructions in one of my archaeology classes. Basically it's guesswork and artistic interpretation.

Sure you have the facial bones, but you have no idea how thick their muscles were, how fleshy their skin was, lip size, what their eyebrows were like, eye color, eyelid characteristics.

There was one study where they gave the same skull model to five different artists and they got back 5 very different heads.

The only way you could to this accurately would be to decode any DNA you find and grow their face, virtually (or in some vat -- yech). The technology is a long way off, needless to say.

Reanimating the Dead

[rpiquepa]

I also covered this subject today on my blog where I gave some additional references, including an illustration of a face reconstruction process.

And remember that this software was shown during last Siggraph. New Scientist published "Animation lets murder victims have final say" on this work about two weeks ago with a nice illustration, "How the dead can express themselves."

In "Skulls gain virtual faces," Technology Research News didn't give much more information.

Re:Oooh!

[theedge318]

You should have watched the Nefertiti Special that was on the (Discovery Channel/TLC ?). It was very cool ... this one Egyptologist that specializes in wigs, saw a wig in a museum ... figured out the time period/gender/social status and surmised that it could have been Nefertiti's. She then got permission to enter the tomb where it was found.

The long and the short ... the show was a bit drawn out ... but they x-rayed the skeleton, shipped it off to a school in England (Nottingham I believe) ... where they blindly (with no a priori knowledge that they would be comparing it against Nefertiti's statue) reconstructed the face from the X-rays.

The end result was suprisingly close ... especially when you consider that the statue is an artists rendition.

What really annoyed me was that the producers of the show did a side by side of the CG head and the statue ... and they rotated them at different speeds ... so I had to use the my homebrew PVR just to pause it when the two heads lined up.