
Show HN: An algorithm to automatically turn photos of food into faces - aaronrandall
http://aaronrandall.com/blog/megabite/
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dewarrn1
Not bad, but not quite Arcimbaldo [0].

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Arcimboldo#/media/F...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Arcimboldo#/media/File%3AGiuseppe_Arcimboldo_-
_Rudolf_II_of_Habsburg_as_Vertumnus_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)

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bayonetz
Whoa. That's pretty rad! Why don't more people know about this guy?
Considering he predates the surrealists by literally hundreds of years, you'd
think he would get more press. This stuff would be right at home in an issue
of Juxtapoz magazine.

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dewarrn1
Striking, isn't it? I ran across his work when taking cog psych/cog neuro
courses. Arcimbaldo's paintings provide a great demonstration of face
perception and — one could argue — face-seeking that our brains perform with
no conscious effort.

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plethora
Just to say, he's quite well known amongst artists and art historians, though
I don't recall learning about him in my Western art history course. Along
similar lines, but more well known is Hieronymus Bosch
[http://lmgtfy.com/?q=hieronymus+bosch](http://lmgtfy.com/?q=hieronymus+bosch).

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megalodon
Fun project, excellent article! Your figures made the algorithms incredibly
easy to grasp.

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aaronrandall
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it :)

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gus_massa
I don't understand how the part of the plate that was covered with food is
reconstructed.

Does this assume that the plate has an uniform color and round symmetry? Does
this work with plates that have circular color stripes?

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aaronrandall
That's a great question! My original plan that once I had extracted all the
items from the plate, the app would then detect the average colour of the
remaining regions and "fill" the gaps - that wouldn't work well with plates
that have different patterns, but would probably be good enough for plates of
a single colour.

Due to time constraints (and ultimately solving the majority of the problems I
had originally aimed to with this project), the app replaces the cropped
circular region with a plain white plate (a separate image contained in the
app) before placing the extracted items.

Maybe I'll go for the more advanced implementation if/when I spend more time
on this project!

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throwthroughtho
Great article, well explained and illustrated. The name is funnier than the
app though. It literally translates to "giant dick" in French.

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jstoiko
So does megabyte and megabit. Grow up! ;)

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RIMR
That's why they call it a mégaoctet.

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dhj
I'm just happy that I got to see a rotational transform of bacon today.

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saspiesas
This is a fantastic example of an interesting academic task, and very well
explained. Thanks for sharing!

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aaronrandall
Awesome, glad you enjoyed it :)

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huehehue
This seems like a great example of a technically/algorithmically challenging
problem that the layman would not appreciate, more so if this could be refined
and applied to a wider set of images.

An elevator pitch for this, if you will, would likely not impress most non-
technical people because, on it's face, what's so hard about rearranging foods
into faces?

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RIMR
There are tons of tasks that are easy for a human to perform, but challenging
for a computer to perform. Deepdream certainly seems to impress the layman.

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thebouv
Think of how revolutionary this is for people who incessantly take photos of
their food and post to Instagram.

We need a "food->face" filter stat. If not for the poster, then one I can
apply to any of my friends' photos they post.

Or maybe I need better friends.

Or eat more photogenic food myself.

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gedsic
Are there other example images? I don't have access to an iOS device right
now.

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andretti1977
Great! This article is a perfect example of excellent documentation for source
code. It would be great if any project had such a good documentation.

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jfries
Great! It's also a nice reminder that it's possible to do automatic image
manipulation with tools other than neural networks.

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Houshalter
We truly live in the future.

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jackmaney
Nitpick: The area should be in units of pixels^2. Other than that, this is
awesome.

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overcast
Bacon to Kevin Bacon?

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wallzz
Am I the only person who read it as "feces"!!!

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jnsaff2
Nope.

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junke
Ugh, millennials.

[http://buttersafe.com/2016/02/02/a-new-generation-of-
art/](http://buttersafe.com/2016/02/02/a-new-generation-of-art/)

