Friday, March 16, 2012

Another Entertainment Application of Facial Recognition Technology

One of the delights of keeping up with biometric technologies is seeing how people use them for purposes that couldn't have been predicted by the people who developed them.

Titanic - the Comic Strip: Clever software can convert any hit film into cartoon by itself (Daily Mail)
Developed at the Hefei University of Technology, in China, the clever tech will first of all analyse a film, identify the characters via facial recognition, and then start taking screen-grabs of the action. Once this is complete, it can shuffle and order the screen-grabs to tell a coherent story through the medium of the comic panel format.

And then finally it can add speech bubbles, and render the finished images in the chosen style, for instance as a cartoon-or as anime.