
Korean Beauty Contestants – Face Morphing - thebadplus
http://jbhuang0604.blogspot.com/2013/04/miss-korea-2013-contestants-face.html
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davvid
I wonder whether this analysis supports the assertion that these were
photoshopped?

[http://kotaku.com/blame-photoshop-for-koreas-beauty-queen-
cl...](http://kotaku.com/blame-photoshop-for-koreas-beauty-queen-
clones-482285894)

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msie
I wish this comment stood out more but HN has eliminated displaying of points.

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lmm
Huh? Points haven't been displayed on comments for at least 18 months.

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marshray
Yes, that was his point. At some point in the past, points were displayed on
comments. But, as you pointed out, now they are not.

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joshguthrie
That's a nice point about points.

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onemorepassword
It's worrying how this keeps getting upvoted despite having been debunked
before it even hit HN, and the top comments on both HN and the original post
pointing to the article that debunks it.

This is one scenario in which HN could really use downvotes.

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PavlovsCat
For me it doesn't really make a huge difference if plastic surgery or
photoshop are the culprit. So these women don't actually all look like clones,
they're just _presented_ as clones; great.

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hkmurakami
That's actually a really interesting point about the cultural backdrop of the
photos being produced.

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PavlovsCat
I think many small changes - each of them incremental, and rather innocent in
and of itself - to maximize "market appeal" (where the market is some kind of
faceless statistical blob), can also lead to this. If you don't know what
you're doing and why you're doing it, and/or if it's not something you really
can believe in, it will show, in some form or another.

Sure, I can't blame anyone for not believing in their job of photoshopping
fashion pics.. but what I find much more unsettling is that young people do
get influenced by this stuff, wether they know/want it or not, and wether the
people pushing the stuff believe in it themselves or not. But it's not just
fashion, our societies are half-assing a lot of things on a massive scale. Too
many hustlers, too little pride in work :(

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just2n
All I see is lots of makeup. Might it more accurately be called a Korean Face
Art Contest?

But really, if we're trying to compare physical beauty, wouldn't the contest
require 0 modification of it? This would likely include banning makeup, any
form of plastic surgery, unnatural hair modifications, and clothing that is
overly supportive. Is there even such a thing? A cursory Google search
suggests no. Even so called "natural beauty pageants" apparently permit caked
on makeup, fake hair, fake teeth (not just orthodontics), etc. I don't see a
point to these beauty contests, in that case. They say nothing about the
person at all.

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tsotha
Look here:

<http://i.imgur.com/7kdgJ32.jpg>

Particularly at #18, where it's most obvious. These pictures have been
photoshopped to give the ladies the elfin look that's popular right now in
Korea.

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leephillips
Some of the real faces have a lot of character - and they were all turned
mindless-looking by the photoshopping.

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just2n
I would argue the same is, or rather can be, true of makeup, in general.

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therobot24
neat, but eigenfaces is really overplayed and outdated, there's lots of better
face recognition algorithms that can handle a bit of distortion/deformation
that really plagues principal component methods

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blueprint
Interested to read about the better algorithms if you have some good
resources.

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simonster
Part of the problem with eigenfaces is that they are really sensitive to
variations in pose, which, as the author notes, are present in this data set.
The article doesn't actually compare the variability among these faces to the
variability among a control population of Korean faces, so I don't know to
interpret the results anyway, but my guess just by looking at the eigenfaces
is that they are capturing pose variation in addition to variation in facial
structure.

Check out the results page on the Labeled Faces in the Wild site for some
better algorithms that are more robust to changes in pose, along with their
performance on a sample data set: <http://vis-
www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html>. Eigenfaces are the worst algorithm tested.
Amazon Mechanical Turk is better than all of the algorithms, even if you show
only the face itself OR show only the remainder of the photograph that doesn't
include the face.

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hkmurakami
I do recall a certain cynical Korean friend of mine quipping, "girls who go to
the same plastic surgeon look more similar than their own sisters"

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sevenatenine
When you look at them individually they don't look very similar. It's mainly
the makeup that highlights the same parts of their faces so when they're
flashed all together (eyes in the same spot) it wrongly appears they all look
the same.

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AYBABTME
The background of the post aside, I find the main idea interesting and fun.
Whatever the validity of the original argument is, I don't think the goal was
to actually prove it, but more to play with maths and code to do something
cool.

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guard-of-terra
"Recognition" should be replaced by "Morphing" in title.

Currently it makes no sense.

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Avshalom
So... like even in the of-course-it-is-what-are-you-completely-naive
photoshopped press photos, they don't really look that similar?

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thebadplus
South korea has a far lower genetic diversity then a lot of european
countries, and America for sure. In a totally non-racist way, the "all look
same" stereotype may have more truth than it does for a lot of other
countries.

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seanmcdirmid
This is quite easy to test: just take 20 beauty queens from North Korea and
see what diversity you get. I believe the genetic diversity in the two
countries is about the same, but they have been isolated for around 50+ years,
so there is some great science to be had once North Korea opens up (think
Iceland).

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sliverstorm
"Beauty queens" is a terrible group to sample from. It is not in any way
whatsoever random, which is what you would need to study. "Beauty" has many
subjective components, which can change rapidly.

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seanmcdirmid
But that's not the point. Take 20 girls from each country who are considered
by some popular standard to be beautiful, and measure variation. Since I'm
assuming plastic surgery is not that widespread in DPRK, the results would be
interesting, even if not very useful.

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sliverstorm
But you aren't just measuring variation in the population. You're also
measuring strictness of beauty standards.

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seanmcdirmid
No, we just measure variation according to some algorithm. The beauty is
subjective based on standards, and the results would definitely be biased by
that subjectivity.

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sp332
"Here we can see that the eigenvalues vanish after 7, suggesting that the rank
of the image data is 6."

Does this mean there are only 6 different faces shared among the 20 girls?

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eigenvector
That's one way of putting it. A rank of six implies that if all of the faces
were represented by a matrix (e.g. with 20 rows, one for each face), the
dimensionality of the column space would be six. That is, all 20 faces could
be represented by linear combinations of six orthogonal faces.

OP implies that six "eigenfaces" faces represent an eigenbasis for the space
of all 20 faces (that they are eigenfaces doesn't necessary imply that they
form an eigenbasis, not every vector space has sufficient geometric
multiplicity to have an eigenbasis).

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svantana
It's all in good spirit, but I can't help to note that it wreeks of the old
racist trope "all <insert ethnicity> look the same"
[http://healthland.time.com/2010/11/24/they-all-look-the-
same...](http://healthland.time.com/2010/11/24/they-all-look-the-same-how-
racism-works-neurologically/)

And perhaps also a bit sexist? I dunno, maybe I'm overly sensitive.

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hnriot
When it's actually got a foundation in math, it stops being a racist trope and
becomes a valid scientific inquiry.

Sexist? Overly sensitive would be one word for it.

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gammarator
The analysis uses math, but that doesn't make it scientific. In particular,
there's no comparison to the similarity of a sample of faces of normal
Koreans, westerners, or beauty contestants.

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mynameishere
I suspect it helps that these women are absolutely caked in makeup. Plus,
averaging out pictures? It gave them an afro. How many Koreans wear afros?

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fatjokes
it's called an ahjumma perm.

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nhebb
Small correction: I saw this somewhere on the web yesterday, and it turns out
that these are Miss Taegu contestants, not Miss Korea.

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wjk
Even with caked makeup and extremely photoshopped pictures they dont even look
that similar.

