
Researchers Reconstruct Faces by Reading Brainwaves - shawndumas
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-we-save-face-researchers-crack-the-brains-facial-recognition-code/
======
a_w
Could advances in this field be used to help blind people to "see" faces etc.
by bypassing the eyes and instead directly communicating with the relevant
neurons?

I would love to read the research paper but unfortunately it is Elseviered!!!

~~~
ethereal_int
Sci hub :) was even on the frontpage here a couple of days ago
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14632603](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14632603)

------
Houshalter
Why are human faces used on monkey subjects? How good are human at recognizing
monkey faces?

~~~
whorleater
Getting human trials is a significantly harder regulatory hurdle than monkey
trials.

~~~
mattkrause
Getting monkey faces, however....

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
Probably a human bias for us. We can pick out differences in human faces
easier, so we can tell the difference in the images.

Looking at those pictures, I'd say that the monkey brain puts on 10 lbs.

------
taneq
Wow, that's improved amazingly in quality since the last time I saw something
similar. Then, the 'reconstructed faces' were blurry blobs that were barely
recognizable as faces. These are great.

~~~
paulgb
It's an apples-to-oranges comparison though. These researchers generated 2000
faces. It sounds like from there they essentially did nearest neighbor search
to find the predicted face. It's still impressive (and accomplished what they
wanted), but it doesn't solve the problem of recreating the images from just
the brainwaves.

~~~
caryando
From the article "In fact, they were nearly indistinguishable from the actual
photos shown to the monkeys." It doesn't really sound like they did that.

~~~
posterboy
Don't take popular media reporting on science at face value. I'm not saying I
know better, though.

------
mattnewton
Somewhat related, this reminds me of a study with cats where they were
reconstructing arbitrary black and white videos from visual cortex brainwaves
at UC Berkeley [https://youtu.be/piyY-UtyDZw](https://youtu.be/piyY-UtyDZw).

I wonder if different social animals will have biases for certain facial
features unique to their species, similar to what the end of the video
suggests. It is what I would expect if our visual information system does work
like a covnet, since important higher but level features would be pushed
further down the stack, and inputs from our eyes that are similar would be
"boosted". But I imagine the truth is much more complicated.

Here they don't seem to be experiencing any "monkey-like" feature boosting, so
the area they chose is either low level enough, this is not a real effect, or
monkeys are similar enough to human faces to not learn different low level
features.

------
crispyambulance
Mind-blowing.

I wonder if they can do the same thing to a monkey that's sleeping and thus
capture what faces a monkey sees in dreams?

~~~
mattkrause
That's what remains to be seen.

They previously identified six "patches" in the monkey brain that are
specialized for processing face-like stimuli. These are embedded in a much
larger brain area involved in object recognition, but it's not clear whether
faces are a special case or if other sorts of object patches remain to be
discovered.

------
kk808ktm
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3868848/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3868848/)
Stitchers? anyone?

~~~
tyingq
I thought of Minority Report and the precog's dreams wired up to the monitors.

------
sharemywin
Wonder how many faces a person can distinguish? I would assume it more than a
monkey, but still interesting.

------
ddoran
At the risk of bing flamed, while I read this and marvel at the technology, I
wince at the terrible cost - animal testing - to achieve this.

CalTech's statement on animal testing is on their website [1] though I'm
always skeptical of "oversight" groups established by an industry itself, as
are PETA [2].

[1]: [https://iacuc.caltech.edu](https://iacuc.caltech.edu) [2]:
[https://www.peta.org/blog/labs-gold-standard-seal-mean-
anima...](https://www.peta.org/blog/labs-gold-standard-seal-mean-animals-
much/)

------
dang
Url changed from [https://singularityhub.com/2017/06/14/forget-police-
sketches...](https://singularityhub.com/2017/06/14/forget-police-sketches-
researchers-perfectly-reconstruct-faces-by-reading-brainwaves/), which points
to this.

