Algorithms Determine Mona Lisa's True Emotions 349
caffeinemessiah writes "The BBC reports that researchers at UIUC and the University of Amsterdam, Holland have used "emotion recognition" software to determine Mona Lisa's true emotions. The algorithm is based on a library of neutral face images of young women and determined that Mona Lisa was 83% happy and 9% disgusted." From the article: "The program, developed with researchers at the University of Illinois, US, draws on a database of young female faces to derive an average 'neutral' expression. The software uses this average expression as the standard for comparisons. The New Scientist says that software capable of recognising emotions just by looking at photographs could lead to PCs that adjust their response depending on the user's mood. "
How this probably works ... (Score:5, Informative)
Once you've either collected them yourself or downloaded them, you need to use a process called eigenanalysis which is basically fancy talk for analyzing a large dataset with multiple classes (emotions) using matrix decomposition.
I've actually worked on many projects involving this and the result is an eigenface (or eigenmask) [mit.edu] that allows you to transform the space that the original image is in and classify it using any of a number of algoirthms that use euclidean distance.
I know I left out a lot but there are many papers out there that you can find on citeseer [psu.edu] and white papers floating around out there [ucsb.edu] that provide a lot of reading material on this.
There are also strategies which require tagging certain features as points on the face (like corners of eyes, corners of mouth, center of eye, etc) and then using the relative distances between all these points to determine what classification you would give a new face. The problem with this is that it requires a lot of hand work to prepare the training set.
Hope this helps anyone who wants to learn more about the actual process used to accomplish this recognition.
I'm..... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:You know (Score:3, Informative)
As for the article... I think these folks just need a hobby.
Re:And... (Score:5, Informative)
Quote from the third paragraph in the article:
It concluded that the subject was 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful and 2% angry, New Scientist magazine was told.
Re:You know (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/leonardo/gallery/mon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa [wikipedia.org]
Finally! (Score:2, Informative)
Interesting to see this idea actually working now. I think I first saw this five years ago on IBM's Alphaworks site. Ah yes, here it is.
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/393/part2/p icard.html [ibm.com]
Re:And... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:You know (Score:5, Informative)
Here [about.com] is an expansion on that...
What is absolutely untrue is the reference in The Da Vinci Code to Leonardo's reputation as a "flamboyant homosexual". He was not known as such. Historical evidence is sketchy about the latter, and the only thing Leonardo was "flamboyant" about was his inability to finish projects he started.
Re:So... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Facial expressions are nature, not nurture (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe someone else pointed this out but the computer isn't really determining her mood, the people who judged all the other faces and constructed the algorithm did it, the computer just did the calculations. But Slashdotters knew that.