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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."
I can't wait to see what that skeleton that hangs in the biology class lab looked like when it was alive!
Does everything include nothing?
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.
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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.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
read it here from the Google cache
Why stop at monkeys? Do you know how many gibbons get murdered and decapitated every day, only to be identified as "Gibbon" and put on display in museums until someone can make a positive identification? If we could talk these lower primates into visiting their dentist more often, we would be able to more accurately identify these poor John Gibbon Does.
You want to ask a real question next?
Interesting article, but just this weekend I watched a special on the Discovery Channel that included this very technique. The cable channel's Nefertiti Resurrected special climaxed with a computer-generated rendering of the "mystery" mummy's face, based on the skull and average tissue thickness at key points. They even noted that the technique was "much faster than traditional clay-sculpture reconstruction"... just like the referenced article.
Jump here to see the results.
By the way, I recommend watching the show. Call me superficial, but I liked the look of the actress who played the doomed queen -- especially her dark skin and freckles. Egypt gets a lot of sun, and SPF 45 was still about 2,900 years away. Much more convincing than Yul Brenner, and a darn sight better looking.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I wonder what it does if a part of the skull is missing. I bet that in many cases, if a skull is found by the police it was a murder. How would the software handle a bullet hole or if part of the skull was crushed. I didn't see it mentioned in the article.
Could be pretty interesting if there was an extra hole in the face and it put the eye in the wrong spot, or even added an extra one.
Imagine all that clay savings! w00t!
Of course, maybe the forensics experts will miss playing with clay...
For archeology, it sounds cool. Will it work on older skulls, or is it homo sapiens only?
(tried RTFA... timeout! slashdotted already?)
Try the google cache.
This can not be the case. This is getting rediculous.
Were going to have to start diseminating slashdot stories on a staggered Timezone based schedule.
While this is a very cool idea, the article was missing a few details. For example, did they try it out on actual skulls and see how close they came to the former owner of that skull?
This last little bit of the article doesn't exactly sell this new technology:
' The current prototype figures suffer a problem common to computer-generated faces, said Evison "They look ridiculously mannequin-like."'
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
So what did the people from africa thousands of years ago actually look like? Has human physical appearance changed over time? According to data collected from the evolution of human appearance what will we look like in the future? I'm thinking huge round skulls but who knows. :)
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How do youo know if the person was a bit overweight and had a double chin or big cheeks? I know I looked ALOT different when I gained about 20 pounds and kept it for a few months till I couldn't afford pizza buffets anymore.
Also, how can a skull help you determine the shape of the person's eyebrows or the shape of their eyes? And they can't use race as a factor because I know alot of caucasians with various eye shapes.
Does it work on pre-human skulls? It would be great to see this work on EVE. It might be more accurate then the "artist's renditions."
how long before the desktop version is out?
I wonder how you would test it? They should ban this, I mean it might cause people to start killing each other just so they can see if the software really works.
"A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of." - Burt Bacharach
IAALS.
Think about the features that people usually associate with a face: eyes, eyebrows, hair, nose, lips...
All of these features are soft, that is to say that there's very little chance you can extrapolate them from the skull's bone structure.
Yes, you can get the basic size of the lips and eyes, and the basic width of the nose. But you cannot tell the eye color, or the lip hue, or the actual shape of the nose or eyebrows.
You would need to extract such things from DNA, if that's even possible today.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Yeah, because being able to reconstruct what someone looked like from using only the skull would so help people invade your privacy. You know, if that skull that you have sitting on your desktop is really of your grandmother like you claim. Really, this is probably the most ridiculous idea that I've ever heard. The only way this can be used is if they have a skull, and then the only application is for identification, for you know, terrible airline tragedies where people's skin has been burned all the way off and their teeth knocked out from their skull.
It is really this paranoid conspiracy ideology that demeans from many of the more rational arguments that exist for civil liberties advocates.
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.
such techniques?
I've seen this technique used in "found skeletal remains" crime investigations and archeological investigations and have always wondered if the technique was accurate or just being done for dramatic effect.
Maybe they could dig up a skull of someone who has an available photograph. Give the skull to three "artists" and see how close the results compare.
I'd say if your decomposed skull turns up somewhere, you have bigger problems than remaining anonymous from the police.
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.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Heh. "...it seems pretty ok cause it is hard to violate a skull's rights" That's just an open invitation to perverse thoughts and snide comments! Or maybe that's just me.
This is not new. Doesn't anybody watch CSI? With the aid of computer technology they are able to zoom in on images taken from blurry security cameras to be able to tell if there is a carpet fiber on the jacket of the person in the very same picture! I'm sure they're able to fully rebuild a complete person from just the skeletal structure, muscles and all. They can probably interpolate from marks on the skeleton and thanks to that guy that knows everything he could probably help out b/c chances are he knew the guy. TV wouldn't lie to me!! Would it...?? *cowers in the corner*
Just because your imagination limits the use for this technology, it doesn't mean that it can't be abused at all.
What if they applied it in reverse for example? They could ruin the livelihood of frenologists all over the US.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
You can get a good idea of weight by the wear on the bones and joints, especially knees and feet and spine. Any joint really. Cartiledge wears away, there may be deformations, signs of poor blood flow or atrophy, etc, etc..
Forensic pathologists can tell all kinds of crazy shit from the littlest scraps of evidence. It's not as glamorous or goofy as CSI, but it's close.
Extra weight puts a lot of telltale stress on your skeleton, just ask CowboyNeel.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The person is also going to look much different based on the climate, diet, amount of exercise, probably even occupation and social class to some extent.
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All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
...we will finally be able to see what Calista Flockhart REALLY looks like?
Ed Wedig
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when MacGuyver did this years ago using eraser heads to build up the thickness of the skin and then recreate the face of a skull he found?
Upgrade your grey matter, cause one day it may matter
Have they reconstructed Otzi the warrior's face yet. Any pictures?
Cool technology though. I wonder if they could extrapolate to the skeleton maybe by scraping the bones or looking at dna to get a body fat percentage and then get a full body view.
I wonder DNA analysis could yield body hair, musculature, and other specifics to find a full body picture. Imagine, we might get to see computer generated pr0n of our ancient ancestors. How hot would that be?
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.
Maybe I should RTFA, but I doubt that, when the Animal Learning Discovery Travel Court Channel showed a face reconstruction from a skull last week, the method was subjected to SCIENTIFIC SCRUTINY. For instance, judges could compare each CAD face to a series of photos, one of them being an actual photo of the skull model (old family photos could be used if the skull model is deceased) and select their best guess. If the average correct photo cannot be selected by more than N% of the judges, the technique cannot be held to be scientifically valid.
Why don't people demand this level of veracity from everything in their life? People down herbal placebos by the truckload and spend big bucks for "ancient Chinese traditional medicine" without even realizing or caring that no scientific study has ever verified such practices. People don't even understand what science IS. They think scientific ideas are just one class of things, existing alongside "traditional," "spiritual," or "alternative" theories. This is ludicrous. There are only two categories of things - things that truly exist or truly work, and things that don't. And the only reliable way to tell them apart is through the scientific method, not an appeal to the supernatural or something's ancientness. How can people have been so inadequately educated? Ugh! I hate everybody.
Sorry, my misanthropy flared up again (as I have trained it to). But on a related note, the Animal Learning Discovery Travel Court Channel also has lots of other forensics shows where they show hair analysis and "blood spatter analysis." And I want to know whether ANY of these things have ever been scientifically established, or whether (and this is my suspicion) they're partially or totally bogus but more than convincing enough to fool the average jury member - who himself probably wears an energy crystal and watches John Edward every week. I'm skeptical about even fingerprint analysis. Has there ever been a study done to support them? I don't know. Every schoolboy is taught about fingerprints and how each one is unique, but what if their effectiveness is just an urban legend that even law enforcement believes? After all, every schoolboy knows about lie detectors too, and those are notorious for being totally bogus, completely unable to withstand and kind of scientific scrutiny. Polygraphs aren't even allowed as evidence. (But, of course, the federal government still uses them for hiring - further proof that the government is stupider even than the average fool.)
I just hope I'm never accused of a crime. Who knows what kind of "analysis" they'll have come up with. "My office analyzed the victim's facial muscles using muscular memory analysis, and I can say with 99.999847% certainty that the last words formed by her mouth were 'No!' followed by the defendant's name."
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(for a Klondike bar)?
Actually, this method (3 dimensional reconstruction of musculature and flesh upon skulls) has been used within anthropology. Here's a site with some interesting photos and explanations of the process used. Pretty informational. Enjoy.
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A former schoolmate at the full scholarship Cooper Union brought his cool package, The Expression Toolkit, into open source. Expression is an animation system based on an anatomical model of the face. Using basic muscle simulations instead of morph targets, Expression simplifies the creation of lifelike characters, allowing a face to be set up in a matter of hours instead of days. Written in C++ and OpenGL, Expression is a general-purpose framework for real-time facial animation in games and web applications.
From the FAQ As far as I know, it has still not reached a critical mass of users