Slashdot Mirror
Eigenfaces Online Service
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."
I'm quite certain that this is a front for the "Politiets sikkerhetstjeneste"!
It helps if you know the language.
My first attempt matched me up to a very nice looking female.
Too bad I'm a male.
So that's what kvimmen means.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Wasn't there something like this in Virtual Light? I think it was used to find missing persons by posting information on which celebrities the abducted/missing person looked like.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
And it suggested This picture ...
So if I upload a picture of my ass, do they match it to Darl McBride?
WHO IS MR. SPARKLE?
Mr. Sparkle is everybody's favorite Japanese pop-culture soap logo. His soap is made only from the purest of plants from the mysterious forests of Hokkaido, Japan. He appears frequently in commercials for his soap, and can be seen on billboards, and outside of the Mr. Sparkle plant. According to his box, Mr. Sparkle is a "magnet for foodstuffs", and he banishes dirt to the land of wind and ghosts. If you are further interested in Mr. Sparkle soap, you can contact the factory in Japan for a videotape on distributing Mr. Sparkle in your home prefecture. http://www.geocities.com/chuckhoyt/mrsparkle.html
This explains a LOT of strange things that have happened to me over the years!
-j
Those bastards! They matched me with goatse!
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
I just finished studying eigenvalues and eigenvectors, now eigenfaces!?!?
Can I upload a photo of me with my tin-foil hat on?
An effective signature identifies a particular user amongst a base of thousands.
A facial recognition system like EigenFace looks for the dominant modes of variation among a population of faces to find predictors that help distinguish among the different faces. By ignore the ways that faces are more similar and accentuating the ways that faces are most different, they can craft identification algorithms. The only challenge is getting enough data to understand the full range of facial variations -- hence this solicitation for more facial data.
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.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
This is all an evil plot to match IP numbers with faces! Don't fall for it! And yes, I am very upset that they said my face most closely matched Paul Reubens.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Lets upload a picture of Shrek .. and see who's face more closely matches...
John Goodman?
Bob Barker?
Alex Travec?
Geraldo Rivera?
= Grow a brain...
Already.
(Pouts) - now I'm gonna have to wait ages to give their boimetric database a picture of me and my IP address.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
FORBANNET Slashdot!
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
I just hope they can keep this out of the hands of the police. They would LOVE to get their hands on a database like this (even with the inevitable false positives you get when people just want to prank the system with mcbride/ hello.jpg type stuff). If you think i'm being too serious about this, think of the blurred lines between the media and serious business that is already the case in some countries. Keeping in the vein of the article, spot the quote: "Now i can feel like Matt Dillon instead of an asshole."
Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
For fun, I put my cat's face into one of these things, and it kept returning Scott Baio as the celebrity he most resembles.
does that mean that it's been /.'ed or that someone has a VERY ugly mug?
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true!" -- Homer Simpson
Perhaps less obvious is the usefulness of this system for syndrome diagnosis. There, we depend on our visual memory of a dysmorphic "Gestalt" to recognize human malformation syndromes. So far, attempts at some kind of computer-aided diagnosis have failed. Too bad, because syndrome diagnosis like we do it now is error-prone and difficult. This system however may be used to recognize typical "syndrome vectors", so you can feed it a patient's picture and have it say "x% match with oculo-dento-digital dysplasia" or whatever disease comes to mind. Potentially very useful!
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
[sarcasm]
;) )
This is a GREAT idea! What will be next? See how closely your fingerprints match the fingerprints of your favorite celebrities? See how well your password stacks up against other users?
Just fill out this form, put in your SS#, mother's maiden name, US address, credit card numbers, and the last 3 tax returns, and we'll show you if you look like Fred Flintstone... and we won't do anything else with your information... HONEST!
[/sarcasm]
(For the humor impaired, and there seems to be an inordinate number of you, I'M KIDDING!
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
If anybody comes up as matching Kevin Costner, they should include a nationwide suicide hotline in the subtext.
well, it's nothing one behind the ear wouldn't cure
Translation:
Subject: Dear God, what has happened to our bandwidth?
Comment: DAMN Slashdot!
I matched Osama Bin Laden. I always wondered why I was strip-searched every time I flew on an airline.
Better yet, test the site out by uploading pictures of celebrities, and see which celebrity is says they most closely resemble.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Has anyone mirrored this story? I want to read who I look like!
How many of you REALLY REALLY want to upload a picture of the goatse guy and see who he most resembles? Any guesses?
Liberalism...the next best thing to thinking.
It is very clever automation.
They have several back-end databases containing tons of eigentits, eigenbums, eigenarses etc. generated through hours of dedicated pron surfing.
If the uploaded image matches too closely to any of these then it is rejected.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
I should point out that I didn't even consider uploading anything indecent until I was warned against doing so. What the hell can be indecent about a face? Then I thought about it for a minute. Hey, what celebrity does my ass most resemble? A bit more thinking, and I realized that I could get instantly matched to Darl McBride by uploading a pic of my schlong.
;)
On a more general note, non-face-specific image recognition software would be handy to have for a lot of reasons. I'm envisioning an object recognizer, where you take a picture or scan of, say, a circuit board. It could spit back something like "That's a SB16 ISA PNP, drivers are www.some.where and compatibility info is www.over.there"
Such a system would need a distributed database, I don't think it would make sense to centralize it. With the right moderation system, you might even be able to keep every circuit board from matching a porn site.
...that the celebrity I most resemble is Dennis Franz's ass!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
But I'll get this up soon, I promise. It's about time I gave back to the community.
probably too late for anyone to see this, but look what I found: an open implementation hosted on sourceforge
It would be interesting to have them not limit the matches returned to just celebrities, but to return matches to other users of the system. Then you could see if you have an evil (or good) twin out there somewhere.
null
Apparently I look like John Travolta - I'm now certain that this site is some kind of Scientologist conspiracy.
Eigenface
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
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
Tried it with a picture of Adolf Hitler, said it matched David Hasselhoff....then tried it with Margaret Thatcher and it matched Naomi Campbell...surely there is somebody with a sick sense of humor really making the matches. Though then again, I do hear Hasselhoff is popular in Europe.