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."

article on Google

[kaan]

read it here [216.239.33.104] from the Google cache

Old news. Like, 3,000 years old.

[RobertB-DC]

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 [discovery.com] 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 [discovery.com] 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 [slipstreampress.org], and a darn sight better looking.

Slashdotted...

[rhexx]

Try the google cache. [216.239.53.104]

Re:What about a fat-ass?

[stratjakt]

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.

Re:Now THAT's useful!

[RayMarron]

I reckon it will only work on specimens that we have average tissue depth data for. If we've never actually seen one with flesh, we'll have to guess.

Re:How accurate is it?

[LaMuk]

30 years ago when I was an Anthropology major, some of my professors built faces back for the Las Vegas police. Sometimes they would start with a skeleton that had been shattered into small pieces.

They were very good about telling age, sex, and race.

They taught us how it was done. Not that I remember much now. But the amount of tissue on the bones is figured out by how thick the bones got a t insertion points. The thicker the bones, the heavier the load.

Sex is easiest to tell by the pelvic bones, but also can be determined by size and shape of face bones. Size helped determine race. It got a little tricky if the bones were small. Was it because the person was female or Asian?

Still they were really good at it and their work identified victims of murders.

Anthropological Use

[HoneyPossum]

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 [shef.ac.uk] of the process used. Pretty informational. Enjoy.