

How would you approach this problem? - cellis

One of my extremely ambitious friends that is rather naive about software dev (but nonetheless wants to make tech money), asked me a question that tortures me to this day: can you build me [an application] that predicts what someones face will look like at 20...60,etc? And maybe its because I haven't had any AI classes yet, or just because I am not looking at this the right way...but it was very interesting to me. Wondering if anyone had an opinion?
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staunch
Just require pictures of the person and their parents, then morph them
together more and more to show aging. It would be far from exact, but plenty
good enough for a popular Facebook app. You can send me my royalties c/o
news.yc.

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dpapathanasiou
Search for "Facial Image Morphing Algorithm" and check out some of the intro
papers.

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whacked_new
It just hit me that you could also look into face averaging, and make a
fantasy application that would "beautify me." Then you could use faces of
other races, eye colors, hairstyles etc. It wouldn't involve as much morph
algorithm development as merging of layers and transparencies after finding
key points. Then you could pitch it to, I dunno, plastic surgeons, hair
stylists, or contact lens makers.

I have the impression that a person nearing 30 is less likely to want to know
how they would look old, than how they would look pretty, artificially or not.

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ivankirigin
Yes, you can predict it.

A number of game engines have face aging techniques. Those are fairly
advanced. Generally, the bone structure does not change, but the cartilage
expands (ears and faces never stop growing) and skin sags. Deterioration of
skin with liver spots, increased transparency, etc. are fairly well known.

This doesn't sound like a very compelling business, but it could be fun.

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dazzawazza
I've worked with the facegen library in a past life to create faces of various
races and ages. They use a statistical model to create faces. There is also a
Russian company whose name escapes me atm that also use a statistical model to
generate faces. You could approach them to license their data.

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jsjenkins168
As cool as that might sound (and technical hurdles aside), you have to ask
yourself, do users really want it? Maybe its just me but I dont think seeing
what you look like as an old person is a burning desire that users need
satisfied..

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nostrademons
Seeing what your _girlfriend_ looks like as an old person, however, could be a
fruitful market. I'd imagine the girls would hate it, but one would probably
come up with a competitor where you put in your boyfriend's picture, food
intake, and exercise habits and it shows you how much of a beer gut he'll have
in 30 years.

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run4yourlives
ooh, that's a good one. Perhaps an off-shoot on a top tier dating site then?

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nostrademons
"I'm in like with you, but only when you're young and sexy"? ;-)

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tuukkah
Step 1: Can _you_ predict what someone's face will morph into with age?

Step 2: Even if you can't, does the domain knowledge exist?

Step 3: ???

Step 4: Facebook app aka profit!

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cellis
very enlightening, and I'm not just saying that. yeah step 3, the
implementation is probably all that matters, but in step 1, are you asking the
user to do this?

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tuukkah
What I wanted to express in the form of this tasteless humour was that AI
isn't going to be your first problem, even though it could be part of some
potential solutions. Modelling the task is the first step. Perhaps I'm wrong
but my understanding of the field of AI is that it's trying to get the effects
of human intelligence via computation. That is, you'd need to find a way human
intelligence could solve the task.

What comes to my mind is some kind of physiological modelling and simulation
of the facial tissues. But perhaps it would be enough to do something more
superficial such as extract features and their statistics from a lot of young-
old pairs of photos and apply the same changes to given photos.

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cellis
Wow, I need to come back to these old threads sometimes. I didn't realize this
got any comments. Thanks

