Slashdot Mirror
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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*
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.
Jon Acheson
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
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
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.