Though the headline seems a bit serial-killerish, the actual result of artist clickflashwhirr’s portrait made up of 500 self portraits is creepy/awesome.
The digital composite was done by Tiemen Rapati, who explains he “simply [counted] the individual RGB values for each pixel and for each portrait, and [divided] those values by the number of portraits.” The result is a slightly hazy, easy on the eyes, year-plus amalgamation of a woman. It’s dreamlike, but unsettling to think the face we’re looking at here never really existed.
Indeed.
via Gizmodo
average is beauty
There must have been a lot of women with some facial feature right next to their nose, because the composite has it quite clearly.
It's all the same girl.
It's made of 500 photos of the same woman idiot, not 500 different ones.
Ergo the face existed, albeit in the "airbrushed perfection" of the digital age.
http://www.petapixel.com/2011/02/11/average-faces… is way more interesting.
to be fair, when I read the title I also thought it was 500 different people. wasn't really any need for the "idiot" comment was there?
yeah I understood that too. but then I looked at the pictures and I was like, "hey, those girls all look the same. is it the same one?"
When completely different people's faces are mapped into one, thus identifying what they have in similarity, it's called an Eigenface (paraphrase on Eigenvectors/Eigenvalues – math functions which create the composite). This is 101 in face recognition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenface
If you were to create a color Eigenface from a lot of very similar people (e.g. caucasian girls of college age), you should arrive to a true "500 faces average", and studies have shown that indeed average IS perceived as "beautiful", even if none of the participants are particularly "model-material". You can also take a different approach and just borrow facial parts from individuals. Human face doesn't really have 500 features we readily identify, so only 5-10 girls would suffice to make a gorgeous composite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimi_Eguchi
There – a composite of truly different people to make a face that doesn't belong to an existing human (or rather belongs in part to all of us): http://chairforcengineer.blogspot.com/2011/02/tec…
Though I know for a fact that I don't look anywhere that handsome. :-)
There was a similar project earlier this year that produced the "average" face for a range of countries:
http://www.geekologie.com/image.php?path=/2011/02…