Skulls Gain Virtual Faces 279
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."
Pretty neat (Score:5, Interesting)
Most recently the Nefertiti one that I watched just the other night.
Soviet Mobs? (Score:4, Interesting)
The real reason is to identify McBride's remains after his speech at Defcon.
This is old stuff (Score:1, Interesting)
it cut thin slices of paper in the shapes and built it upwards. basically you had a block of "wood" in the shape. the skull was the input.
that was neat stuff. clay isnt that cool compared to how this machine was utilized.
Re:Pretty neat (Score:4, Interesting)
Most earlier reconstructions are done by artists with clay. On Nova about 6 years ago they showed how to build up from a skull.
1. Glue on pencil erasers to set the skin thickness
2. Cover with modeling clay to make the features using the erasers as a guide.
3. ???
You know the rest.
Pre-Human Skulls (Score:2, Interesting)
Not Very New (Score:1, Interesting)
How can this be all that useful? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Jaw bone lifestyle (Score:4, Interesting)
Not Scientific (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I already wrote such a program years ago! (Score:1, Interesting)
Reanimating the Dead (Score:4, Interesting)
I also covered this subject today on my blog [weblogs.com] 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 [newscientist.com]" on this work about two weeks ago with a nice illustration, "How the dead can express themselves [newscientist.com]."
In "Skulls gain virtual faces [trnmag.com]," Technology Research News didn't give much more information.
But is it SCIENTIFIC? (Score:3, Interesting)
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."
Re:Oooh! (Score:4, Interesting)
The long and the short
The end result was suprisingly close
What really annoyed me was that the producers of the show did a side by side of the CG head and the statue
Re:How accurate is it? (Score:2, Interesting)
To better enhance accuracy, the process should produce multiple image results to account for differences in skin color and weight changes, as previously mentioned.
Perhaps this technique can be correlated with genetic attributes from the skeleton. These attributes may help determine the skin color, genetic weight predisposition, and any other physical attributes that can be ascertained from the genetic sequences.
Of course, not all variables external to the genetic code would be accounted for. Unless you can correlate the person's features with anything from the civilization and era the person belonged to.
Open Source Facial Animation software might help (Score:2, Interesting)
A former schoolmate at the full scholarship Cooper Union [slashdot.org] brought his cool package, The Expression Toolkit [sourceforge.net], 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 [sourceforge.net] As far as I know, it has still not reached a critical mass of users