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Those are the results with a training set of 7000, I imagine it would get spookily accurate with a 50K training set.
Quite interesting however the portraits really have almost no resemblance to the subjects. Yeah they look kinda "similar" but virtually every facial feature other than base racial feature is incorrect. All of the renderings attempt to pretty much render a racially correct "grey face" which can pretty much fit almost anyone. Everything else from the shape and position of the eyes, nose bridge, cheekbones, lips etc. do…
This was linked in the article itself and at the end:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/science/building-face-and-...
Quite interesting however the portraits really have almost no resemblance to the subjects. Yeah they look kinda "similar" but virtually every facial feature other than base racial feature is incorrect. All of the renderings attempt to pretty much render a racially correct "grey face" which can pretty much fit almost anyone. Everything else from the shape and position of the eyes, nose bridge, cheekbones, lips etc. do…
So instead of generating images, this software could simply take a DNA sample and spit out the characteristics the facial recognition software already takes as input. Up comes a list of names and addresses of the handful of people that the DNA can possibly belong to, even if they have never been in a DNA database. The software already has to calculate these things before delivering the facial image, so delivering the characteristics would actually be a subset of the capabilities he has already built. Scary stuff.
My gut reaction to this was so what we've all seen DNA generated faces our whole lives... and nobody finds that in any way remarkable...
Now it can be done with $100 worth of DNA analysis and a few minutes of compute time.
I wanted to do something similar last year, but I figured that I'd need a lot of input data to classify on facial features. Where do people get the input data?
Maybe they could divine how close the eyes are or how big the nose is... but even that doesn't seem terribly accurate from these picture. I suppose the technique will get better soon enough, but I doubt anything approaching publicly recognizable accuracy will be achieved by this method alone.
Environment plays a large role in facial appearance. Weight, diet, habitual emotional expressions, facial hair, to say nothing of acne, injuries, facial exercises (for the muscles in the face) or reconstructive surgery. Maybe they could divine how close the eyes are or how big the nose is... but even that doesn't seem terribly accurate from these picture. I suppose the technique will get better soon enough, but I dou…
The inaccuracy arrives from the black box statistical process they use to generate the face. They don't know the full story behind how billions of strands of DNA can scaffold a physical face made out of billions of cells, nerves and blood vessels.
Instead they just measure a bunch of faces relate it back to certain known attributes in the DNA and then generate a face. This process will always be inaccurate. In short they treat the system like a black box and build a simulation of the black box by only establishing correlations between input and output.
Imagine if some alien race used this type of process in attempt to analyze the linux operating system running on a computer. They measure the electrical output of each pixel in the monitor and they find statistical correlations between pixel configurations in the monitor and the arrangement of bits in the cpu register. Using this process the Aliens can only gain a very flawed understanding of what's actually happening.
Those are the results with a training set of 7000, I imagine it would get spookily accurate with a 50K training set.