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Some Eye-Popping Research From Siggraph
jamie found links to a discriminating selection of Siggraph papers at waxy.org. Among the more captivating: automatically improving the attractiveness of faces in portraits; automatic substitution of similar faces into photographs (with potential applications such as a privacy-enhanced Google Street View); and using still photographs to enhance video of a static scene.
"Beauty is Symmetry, and you have none"
One of the main characters in the plastic surgery show Nip/Tuck made that comment. It seems as if TFA applies said comment.
All I got back was an email that read "ROTFLMAO!"
Just add symmetry and make thinner.
I wonder how soon they will be offering the "attractiveness improvement" service to the photos of their subscribers. I don't think they have enough CPU power to improve mine, though.
I rotated the pairs of adjusted faces so they were left to right (and the faces were on their sides), and defocused my eyes as if I was looking at a 3D stereo pair of pictures to see what would happen. The slight differences made the portraits appear to me as if they had been photographed in 3D. The places that had been changed were subtly evident as a misalignment -- in the eyes of some, for example. I realize this is a fudged 3D effect, but might there be some use for it?
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I write pointed political and business short stories at http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/
The first two are meh-worthy, but the last one approaches magic-grade technology. Wow!
+0 Meh
I'll never trust an image or video ever again. Never. Ever. Make sure you watch the "enhance video of a static scene" clip.
the question is in twenty years time will you trust the news you see on TV?
when cheap, easy, video editing allows this then supposedly real footage: news, family videos, wedding snaps will lose all veracity.
after every girl wants to look good for her wedding...
and before somebody says "it will never happen" this is only a logical extension of red-eye removal.
I'd call this karmawhoring, but seeing as the editors didn't even bother linking to claimed list at 'waxy.org'... lists of Siggraph papers have been kept by Tim Rowley and Ke-Sen Huang for years. You can find this year's list at:
http://kesen.huang.googlepages.com/sig2008.html
And an overview of all years at:
http://kesen.huang.googlepages.com/
This also includes lists of papers presented at other events such as Eurographics.
For even more fun, visit the papers' authors sites; they often also publish papers at seemingly unrelated events that contain some interesting computer graphics gems.
This will save porn companies a bundle...
It's all about the smile. The red-haired girl suddenly looks so much better when she's smiling.
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
I could not decide, which versions looked better. I only recognized that they ere mostly non that good looking on both fotos.
Then I looked closer, because I know a bit about the methods behind it. And they did some big errors, like copying the one side of a face to the other, when the face did not look perfectly straight into the camera. This gave some weird results. Some faces even looked quite unnatural (especially, but not solely the focus on huge foreheads.
P.S.: I'm happy that I now since the last months know trough experience, that my opinion that looks matter, were wrong.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Making faces more attractive is easy. All you have to do to get a reasonable increase is to make them more symmetrical.
If you want yet another increase, there is a set of ratios for distances between features that uncannily applies to pretty much everyone who is widely considered attractive. Shift everything closer to those ratios, and you'll get a big improvement.
Want more? Fix skin blemishes.
Between the three of those, you can make incredible strides. I would highly encourage any interested to watch "The Human Face".
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Now she can look as good the morning after as she did the night before!
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
Video does lie now.
Can video ever be trusted again where evidence is concerned?
They're using their grammar skills there.
Once again someone's trying to write a bloated piece of software to overcharge for something our systems already do.
See the following example for how I was able to increase the attractiveness of an already attractive Hooters girl using only Microsoft Paint. (exported via Fireworks for filesize optimization)
http://img119.imageshack.us/img119/9474/hooters4si8.jpg
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
A couple of items of interest displayed at Siggraph this year as well which I think have potential.
Microsoft's come up with a way of painting objects onto an object extracted from a video, then reinserted to the video that remains accurate when the camera angle's changed. Their research paper's called Unwrap Mosaics, and you can see a video on Youtube here (higher quality video on the reseach page).
A company called Image Metrics have made a video with actress Emily O'Brien, using Light Stage technology from USC's Institute of Creative Technologies (an example of this is on a Google presentation called New Techniques for Rendering Human Performances) to create a realistic animated virtual face, that has convinced an editor on VFXWorld that they've passed the uncanny valley. Article is here.
I've been thinking that it was only a matter of time until editing video would become similar to editing photos, I just though it would take a lot more time, but everything is already here. They can even create realistic hair based on photos, just think what technology we'll have in the next decade, this could be in our homes by then.