

Genetic mugshot recreates faces from nothing but DNA - andlima
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129613.600-genetic-mugshot-recreates-faces-from-nothing-but-dna.html

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tokenadult
It would be helpful to see more validation examples like the photograph of the
former New Scientist reporter shown with the article. I wonder how we would
judge the resemblance if the photographs hadn't shown the additional gray
outline (complete with earring in the same design!) with the computer-
generated images.

I know plenty of examples of people from the same family lineage (siblings or
first cousins) who grew up in different countries, and there is considerable
influence of diet and other factors of childhood environment on people's
appearance. For the computer-generated images, presumably the image-generating
software is choosing a central-tendency value for the facial features
predicted by the genetic samples, but for forensic purposes it would be
important to know the "reaction range" for each gene assembly, as that
reaction range may be quite large. For example, my two American nieces who are
monozygotic twins were brought up in the same household by the same parents,
but they do not look indistinguishably "identical," but rather can be told
apart readily by their parents and other close relatives and told apart with
careful thought by other people who know them. Genes have never been the whole
story about how people look.

German monozygotic twins Otto and Ewald, who pursued two different sports and
ended up with very different physiques,[1] are a classic example in genetics
classes of how genes are not completely destiny for personal appearance.

[1]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=Otto+Ewald](https://www.google.com/search?q=Otto+Ewald)

[http://thesameffect.com/check-out-identical-twins-otto-
and-e...](http://thesameffect.com/check-out-identical-twins-otto-and-ewald/)

~~~
bane
I agree that diet and other environmental factors definitely contribute to
appearance. For example, even though many Americans are largely European
stock, there are certain developmental tendencies in some areas that I feel
like it's possible to, with a better than chance guess and based on a little
observation, tell if somebody is American or European - it can be something in
the food, or differences in popular sports, or social body language, but all
leading to developmental differences.

Of course I'm generalizing a bit, but I'm almost as good as my native South
Korean wife at guessing where a person from East Asia is from. It's a
combination of factors, height, facial features, but often as not it's fashion
(which includes hair, eyebrows, facial hair, glasses style) etc.

An interesting test is found here
[http://alllooksame.com/](http://alllooksame.com/)

I can guess it pretty above average.

But it's a pretty big jump from guessing what stock a person is from to
predicting what they look like based on their stock.

The problem with the examples in the article of course is that the example
really looks very little like the actual woman. In fact, it's a pretty
terrible likeness, especially in the eyes. About the only part that's
debatable is the nose. I wouldn't rely on it for a police sketch.

Another challenge will be in populations with large groups of "mixed"
children. Americans are a reasonable example, even though we're largely
Europeans at this point in history, that's changing quickly, and even in the
Caucasian population, there are very few who don't have ancestors from all
over the place. What about my children? Will they have red hair or dark hair,
epicanthic folds or not? Will they be barrel chested like my father's side, or
have a physique more like my wife's? Even dominant genes can be suppressed in
the right hormonal and developmental environment.

This sounds very sci-fi, but it's as long away off as those novelty "what will
your children look like" facial morphers that were so popular in the 90s.

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tantalor
This is more like a facial composite[1] than a mug shot[2]. A mug shot is a
photo of an _identified_ person. A facial composite is a synthetic graphic of
an _unidentified_ person. The distinction is important because a facial
composite is an investigative tool use to identify a suspect, and a mug shot
is not.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_composite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_composite)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mug_shot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mug_shot)

~~~
arrrg
It says right there that the purpose of a mug shot is also to identify a
suspect. Even when the police gets a hold of someone and can take a photo
there is no reason to think that identification is no longer necessary.
Identification is probably what most criminal cases are about and being able
to get to know someone’s name and to make a photo of them is not the actual
relevant part of the identification for solving a crime.

Conceptually I would agree that this is more similar to facial composites
(it’s a recreation of the suspect’s face not directly via a photograph but via
some other means, either memory or, in this case, DNA) but comparing it to mug
shots is not absurd or even weird. There is even a good argument one could
make that this is conceptually more similar to mug shots than facial
composites: both photos and DNA don’t rely on someone else via memory but
directly on the suspect.

Since mug shots are well known making the comparison for the sake of a
headline makes perfect sense. The term facial composite is much less well
known. The conceptual similarity is there either way.

I think the comparison very clearly communicates why this new way of creating
mug shots is very useful and as such there is nothing wrong with it.

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blueblob
"One day, the technique may even allow us to gaze into the faces of extinct
human-like species that interbred with our own ancestors."

I don't know how accurate that statement is. They can predict human faces
because they can look at examples of DNA and the paired human face, they would
have to use unsupervised machine learning for extinct species and have no real
way to validate it.

~~~
anigbrowl
If you developed it to give consistently good results on other primates and
then other mammals, then you could probably feel pretty confident about things
such as cranial shape, eye color etc. etc.

~~~
thaumasiotes
We could probably feel pretty confident about eye color right now. What color
are gorilla eyes? Howler monkey eyes? _Humans_ barely vary in eye color at
all; fancy European eye colors are a very recent phenomenon.

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quasque
Note that the research paper[1] includes a link to the image-generating
software[2] they've written.

Quite interesting to play with to get an interactive feel for how the various
parameters of their model affect the facial appearance. You really need to
read the paper to figure out what's going on though.

[1]
[http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...](http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1004224)

[2]
[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12163246/PC2014/DNA2FACE...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12163246/PC2014/DNA2FACEIN3D.zip)

------
Someone
We are getting close to the yearly annoyance that is April fools' day, but
this seems legitimate (a day would be fine, but it's starting to be more like
a month, so I had to check that the New Scientists is published weekly). The
article somewhat exaggerates the performance, though, by showing the copy-
pasted hair, ears and earring (in gray). The PLOS paper
([http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...](http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1004224))
doesn't show any of those. Ears in particular, seem a logical next target.

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tunesmith
It's sort of like our earlier generations' expectations of privacy were set
only by security-through-obscurity.

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Volscio
Similar: Heather Dewey-Hagborg's project
[http://deweyhagborg.com/strangervisions/](http://deweyhagborg.com/strangervisions/)

In Stranger Visions artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg creates portrait sculptures
from analyses of genetic material collected in public places. Working with the
traces strangers unwittingly leave behind, Dewey-Hagborg calls attention to
the impulse toward genetic determinism and the potential for a culture of
genetic surveillance.

~~~
lambdaphage
What does "the impulse towards genetic determinism" mean here? Comparisons of
identical twins raised apart show that physical appearance is highly
heritable, so it would seem that "the impulse towards genetic determinism" is
in this case correct.

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kjell
See also:

"Heather talks about how a fixation with a single hair led to a controversial
art project, the study of genetics, and the bones of an unidentified woman"

[https://vimeo.com/71657839](https://vimeo.com/71657839)
[http://deweyhagborg.com/strangervisions/portraits.html](http://deweyhagborg.com/strangervisions/portraits.html)

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ParkerK
It's eerie how accurate they recreated her nose. It'll be interesting to see
how soon this takes off

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riter
"Yes, the perp is some Puerto Rican guy of average Puerto Rican height"

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sanxiyn
I want this in my next MMO character design system.

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defen
The first step to getting rid of ugly people, humanely. /s

