Researchers Reconstruct Faces by Reading Brainwaves

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-we-save-face-researchers-crack-the-brains-facial-recognition-code/

by shawndumas • 9 years ago

99 20 9 years ago

scientificamerican.com

dang• 9 years ago

Url changed from https://singularityhub.com/2017/06/14/forget-police-sketches..., which points to this.

kk808ktm• 9 years ago

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3868848/ Stitchers? anyone?

tyingq• 9 years ago

I thought of Minority Report and the precog's dreams wired up to the monitors.

taneq• 9 years ago

Wow, that's improved amazingly in quality since the last time I saw something similar. Then, the 'reconstructed faces' were blurry blobs that were barely recognizable as faces. These are great.

paulgb• 9 years ago

It's an apples-to-oranges comparison though. These researchers generated 2000 faces. It sounds like from there they essentially did nearest neighbor search to find the predicted face. It's still impressive (and accomplished what they wanted), but it doesn't solve the problem of recreating the images from just the brainwaves.

caryando• 9 years ago

From the article "In fact, they were nearly indistinguishable from the actual photos shown to the monkeys." It doesn't really sound like they did that.

crispyambulance• 9 years ago

Mind-blowing.

I wonder if they can do the same thing to a monkey that's sleeping and thus capture what faces a monkey sees in dreams?

mattkrause2• 9 years ago

That's what remains to be seen.

They previously identified six "patches" in the monkey brain that are specialized for processing face-like stimuli. These are embedded in a much larger brain area involved in object recognition, but it's not clear whether faces are a special case or if other sorts of object patches remain to be discovered.

Houshalter• 9 years ago

Why are human faces used on monkey subjects? How good are human at recognizing monkey faces?

whorleater• 9 years ago

Getting human trials is a significantly harder regulatory hurdle than monkey trials.

mattkrause2• 9 years ago

Getting monkey faces, however....

DanielleMolloy• 9 years ago

For invasive data like electrophysiology, not for fMRI. In fact few months ago there was a similar study about reading human faces from human brains via fMRI: https://twitter.com/ccnlab/status/866548346751725568

radarsat1• 9 years ago

I would guess it depends how much time said human has spent around said monkeys (or pictures of their faces..)

And vice-versa.

mattnewton• 9 years ago

Somewhat related, this reminds me of a study with cats where they were reconstructing arbitrary black and white videos from visual cortex brainwaves at UC Berkeley https://youtu.be/piyY-UtyDZw.

I wonder if different social animals will have biases for certain facial features unique to their species, similar to what the end of the video suggests. It is what I would expect if our visual information system does work like a covnet, since important higher but level features would be pushed further down the stack, and inputs from our eyes that are similar would be "boosted". But I imagine the truth is much more complicated.

Here they don't seem to be experiencing any "monkey-like" feature boosting, so the area they chose is either low level enough, this is not a real effect, or monkeys are similar enough to human faces to not learn different low level features.

sharemywin• 9 years ago

Wonder how many faces a person can distinguish? I would assume it more than a monkey, but still interesting.

ddoran• 9 years ago

At the risk of bing flamed, while I read this and marvel at the technology, I wince at the terrible cost - animal testing - to achieve this.

CalTech's statement on animal testing is on their website [1] though I'm always skeptical of "oversight" groups established by an industry itself, as are PETA [2].

[1] https://iacuc.caltech.edu [2]: https://www.peta.org/blog/labs-gold-standard-seal-mean-anima...

a_w• 9 years ago

Could advances in this field be used to help blind people to "see" faces etc. by bypassing the eyes and instead directly communicating with the relevant neurons?

I would love to read the research paper but unfortunately it is Elseviered!!!

ethereal_int• 9 years ago

Sci hub :) was even on the frontpage here a couple of days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14632603

Researchers Reconstruct Faces by Reading Brainwaves

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