The Boombox Incident: removing bald people from photos

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19462007

by _cr1k • 7 years ago

225 57 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

dsr_• 7 years ago

I wonder how well it works on people who have a skin color closer to their hair color.

swish_bob2• 7 years ago

I was about to suggest it really needs to at least be tried on people with darker skin tones.

Double_a_92• 7 years ago

Or old white people.

ovi256• 7 years ago

Yeah, his baldness detector is not robust as it just checks the average color of the area above the forehead, but you could make a robust one through transfer learning a deep model trained on ImageNet further finetuned on a small dataset of a few dozen images of bald and non-bald.

Something like this: https://www.kaggle.com/dansbecker/transfer-learning

This method gets good, robust performance with just a few minutes of training.

cyborgx7• 7 years ago

Since trained classifiers are already being used, and therefore fair game, a trained baldness classifier would be a better choice, I think. Of course you would need a dataset for that.

benj111• 7 years ago

I was thinking this is a potentially racist algorithm.

Worked well for Amazon!

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automatio...

jedimastert• 7 years ago

For the actual removal, you could try using conent-aware resizing[1] along with blob detection to give the person to be removed a negative weight.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qadw0BRKeMk&t=3m43s

amelius2• 7 years ago

When they apply this to the DVD cover of Die Hard 4, what would the result be?

birdiesanders• 7 years ago

As a bald man, I approve!

thih9• 7 years ago

Loosely related video, Star Trek actor talks about being bald: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqm_Iq8rFeg .

I'm linking it to remind that perceiving baldness as something negative (here: a criterion for removal from a photo) can be a cause of distress and loss of confidence.

djhworld• 7 years ago

I know this article is trying to be tongue in cheek but I definitely think it's worth highlighting this issue.

MRD85• 7 years ago

My issue is most people won't find it in bad taste to make this tongue in cheek article. If someone made an article "Remove Mexicans from a photo" most people would realise it's harmful. Baldness is mostly genetic and I think it's horrible to pick on people for it, especially when it can be a huge issue for them.

throwaway88792• 7 years ago

I do understand why people would feel insecure about baldness. Is it changing for the better though? Loads of "cool" bald people, think Vin Diesel etc. I still have a head full of hair and just turned 30. Not sure how I'd feel as I've had long hair all my life. I do feel that the volume isn't as high as it was in my early 20s..

I hope we make some progress in a cure either way.

adrianN• 7 years ago

There is medication that can prevent baldness. It has very rare, but very scary side-effects though. Eventually we might have something that fixes the genes responsible for baldness.

cafard• 7 years ago

I am not, strictly speaking, bald--I have about as much hair as Eisenhower did when he was president. My vanity is much more committed to not caring (or not showing that I care) about such matters than it is to the full head of hair I had years ago.

ahoy2• 7 years ago

I went bald very young (started shaving my head around age 20/21 because there just wasn't enough left).

It was a big hit to my confidence, especially as a teen. I also felt it prematurely "aged" me - I used to joke that I turned 28 on my 18th birthday.

It is nice that there are successful/attractive men who are bald to point to, but I was more often compared to Moby or Billy Corgan, not exactly sex symbols.

It all seems silly in retrospect but it felt very serious at that age. I'm so used to it now that I don't even think about it. It helps that I'm old enough that being bald is "age appropriate" and I stick out less than I did in college.

glassesman• 7 years ago

Thanks for encouraging progress in a cure. Honestly, it all really depends on who you are. Some people don't really mind. Other people, like myself, are drastically affected by it emotionally. I've never really been a masculine guy, and having long, thick hair was part of that. Suddenly having it thin, seemingly overnight, at the age of 18 was a really frustrating thing. It gets frustrating when I want to dress certain ways, but can't pull off various looks because my bald head doesn't fit in with it. I feel like I've been roped into a very specific way of dressing as a result and, once again, the whole thing is really frustrating. I see some of my co-workers come in with fresh and stylish hair cuts and I become jealous I can no longer express myself in the same way.

I don't let it stop me from living my life and doing the things I want, but it's still a garbage thing that I absolutely will not deny has affected me every day.

Insecurities aside, I hate not having natural protection from the sunlight and cold. I miss being able to go to the beach without a hat.

aiyodev• 7 years ago

I think it's kind of interesting that, thirty years later, the CEOs of SpaceX and Blue Origin are bald men.

keiferski• 7 years ago

Elon Musk is bald?

stefs• 7 years ago

in my personal opinion: baldness used to be unsexier, but that changed in the last 1-2 decades. nowadays it's another hairstyle people might adopt even if they're not bald - fashionable, especially combined with a beard.

being partially bald (instead of going all in ... or all out?) feels like it's (still?) unstylish, as a tonsure (monk spot?) is not a hairstyle you'd be going for on purpose.

though, as i grow older myself, as in 30+, even though i still have a head full of hair i tend to notice it less and less as there are so many people in my social circle (mostly in the 25-45 year age group) sporting partially bald heads it pretty much became the new normal.

edit: one of the reasons might be that people started to get in shape more. if people are balding but in shape, the lack of hair becomes secondary. as linked below: http://extrafabulouscomics.com/comic/180/

amelius2• 7 years ago

One problem with becoming bald is that you now have to worry: what do I do with my sideburns (a sign of masculinity)? Do I trim them at the top and the bottoms?

Grustaf3• 7 years ago

Come on are there no limits to how sensitive people can be? It’s joke article on the internet, if that offends someone they need to see a shrink. I’m sensitive about my hair in person, with people I care about, but you really can’t be worrying about what online jokers joke about. That would be a full time job.

cantcomplain• 7 years ago

I know this was a joke but I still wanted to see more examples

qrbLPHiKpiux• 7 years ago

George is by far my favorite sitcom character. His schizo-nuances and paranoia and hilarious! I can relate.

throwaway88792• 7 years ago

Very much agreed. That character is so memorable that it's difficult for me to think of him playing a non-George role. I think the actor had trouble with post-Seinfeld roles too.

Insanity3• 7 years ago

For me it's the same with characters from Friends. I can't see them in another role (except Jennifer, it's kind of odd to see her in other things but not as much as the others).

That being said, George is an absolutely great character and one of my favourites in sitcoms :) Just reading these comments makes me want to rewatch Seinfeld.

ujhmi6• 7 years ago

George Costanza is Jason Alexander + Larry David. I recommend you watch Curb Your Enthusiasm if you enjoyed Seinfeld.

Mediterraneo10• 7 years ago

I would also recommend Curb Your Enthusiasm, but there is a difference: Larry David is neurotic, but even in his fictional Curb Your Enthusiasm persona he is extremely wealthy and successful. That is a big difference from George Constanza, who combined being neurotic with constantly being adrift employment-wise and has little to recommend himself.

smashingfiasco• 7 years ago

I really like that you explained the algorithm and decisions you were making instead of just ploping code some on the page.

Well done!

mkagenius2• 7 years ago

Deep learning with a 100 samples can do this completely with the body too. This is a similar project I did: https://comic2gif.com where I remove the speech written on the images, the same technology can be used here.

nacs• 7 years ago

But edge detection is a lot easier on comics than on photos I would think. The background on a comic would also have a mostly solid color background which makes it easier.

mkagenius2• 7 years ago

But edge detection is a lot easier on comics than on photos I would think

That should be true. But deep learning based models work quite good on natural images as Vgg dataset is mostly natural. This is perhaps one-off usage/application on comics.

scrp• 7 years ago

So close!

thebladerunner• 7 years ago

Technical aspects aside, this post is in a really bad taste.

Next time you're itching to show off your chops, maybe pick a project that does not involve airbrushing people somehow deemed unworthy of being remembered, based on their looks?

During world war II, the Nazis had the laborious task of detecting Jews among the occupied populations, at scale. Is that also a task worthy of being automated and then writing a post about it?

partiallypro• 7 years ago

Now show how to add back a cartoon character drawing of the boss (bald man,) like in the show.

Grustaf3• 7 years ago

As a photo store clerk I can confirm that this is indeed one of the most frequent requests we get, so this could be a huge timesaver. But you really need to work on the removal part, it’s practically unusable as it is!

_cr1k• 7 years ago

hey, author here, thanks for the attention on this post, especially the feedback regarding CV techniques. i wanted to write about some basic computer vision tools in the context of a Seinfeld reference. it was intended as a joke, but i realize it could be hurtful. i'm sorry if i hurt anybody's feelings.

The Boombox Incident: removing bald people from photos

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