Friday, July 24, 2009
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Swapping facial features protects online privacy
` NOBODY IS EVER SATISFIED WITH THEIR FACE; EVEN CLEOPATRA WAS WORRIED THAT HER NOSE WAS A LITTLE LONGER THAN IT SHOULD BE.
MARILYN MONROE COMMITTED SUICIDE -- A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN, BUT NOT SATISFIED, NOT CONTENTED. THERE IS SOMETHING IN IT. ALL ` FACES ARE FUNNY BECAUSE ALL FACES ARE FALSE. -- OSHO
DEEP DOWN, YOUR BEING IS FACELESS That's what Zen people call the original face.
After finding itself in hot water with privacy advocates, Google has begun obscuring the faces of people in its Street View service, which lets users of Google Maps zoom in to view street level images. But the images look decidedly odd, with whole streets peopled by blurred faces.
It needn't be this way, says Neeraj Kumar of Columbia University, New York. Kumar and his colleagues have developed software that gives everyone a face - just not their own. The software randomly selects 33,000 photos of faces from picture-sharing sites like Flickr.com, then picks the most suitable faces for each person in shot. Only the eyes, nose and mouth are used, resulting in a composite image of the two people. "It matches subject pose, lighting conditions and image resolution," says Kumar. "The selected faces are aligned to common 3D coordinates, corrected for colour and lighting, and blended into the target image."
The end result is a convincing face rather than a blur, although the team's images (tinyurl.com/6ehog5) can be spooky, especially when people get features from the opposite sex. What's more, the software works automatically. "Previous face replacement software required manual assistance, much like editing an image in Photoshop," says Kumar.
Aside from Street View, the system could be used to obscure the faces of military personnel or eyewitnesses to crime. It could also allow amateur photographers to improve group shots, by replacing frowning faces with better photos of the same people. Swapping facial features protects online privacy
MARILYN MONROE COMMITTED SUICIDE -- A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN, BUT NOT SATISFIED, NOT CONTENTED. THERE IS SOMETHING IN IT. ALL ` FACES ARE FUNNY BECAUSE ALL FACES ARE FALSE. -- OSHO
DEEP DOWN, YOUR BEING IS FACELESS That's what Zen people call the original face.
After finding itself in hot water with privacy advocates, Google has begun obscuring the faces of people in its Street View service, which lets users of Google Maps zoom in to view street level images. But the images look decidedly odd, with whole streets peopled by blurred faces.
It needn't be this way, says Neeraj Kumar of Columbia University, New York. Kumar and his colleagues have developed software that gives everyone a face - just not their own. The software randomly selects 33,000 photos of faces from picture-sharing sites like Flickr.com, then picks the most suitable faces for each person in shot. Only the eyes, nose and mouth are used, resulting in a composite image of the two people. "It matches subject pose, lighting conditions and image resolution," says Kumar. "The selected faces are aligned to common 3D coordinates, corrected for colour and lighting, and blended into the target image."
The end result is a convincing face rather than a blur, although the team's images (tinyurl.com/6ehog5) can be spooky, especially when people get features from the opposite sex. What's more, the software works automatically. "Previous face replacement software required manual assistance, much like editing an image in Photoshop," says Kumar.
Aside from Street View, the system could be used to obscure the faces of military personnel or eyewitnesses to crime. It could also allow amateur photographers to improve group shots, by replacing frowning faces with better photos of the same people. Swapping facial features protects online privacy
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Companionate Marriage
After the free-love ardor of the 1960s sexual revolution cooled down, a brave new vision of marriage emerged from its ashes. This has come to be known as "companionate marriage." In such a partnership, spouses have a mutual interest in career and home, and share in raising children. They talk over dinner, take turns doing dishes, fret together over the children's schooling, and arrange the occasional date night. To many Americans, the Obamas' recent studiously scheduled outing together would represent the apogee of a successful equitable marriage. To Cristina Nehring, author of the ambitious polemic A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century, one suspects, it would represent all that is wrong with marriage today...More at…Crazy in Love
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