NikonGear'23

Images => People, Portraits, Street, PJ & Cityscapes => Topic started by: Jack Dahlgren on February 14, 2019, 23:14:32

Title: Portraits of no one
Post by: Jack Dahlgren on February 14, 2019, 23:14:32
Researchers in my company have made it possible to create portraits of people who never existed. Try checking the following link. Refresh for another portrait of someone who doesn't exist. I wonder if I click enough it will eventually show someone who looks just like me.

https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: BEZ on February 14, 2019, 23:55:42
Most of the images don't look real  ....I will never know if that is because you told me they are not?  interesting!
Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: golunvolo on February 14, 2019, 23:56:42
They don´t look that real but I find it fascinating nonetheless. I have spend sometime looking at those non-existing people.
Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: Jack Dahlgren on February 15, 2019, 00:32:17
Certainly photographers have a keen eye for the flaws in these images, but these are very early days...
Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: CS on February 15, 2019, 00:40:38
Researchers in my company have made it possible to create portraits of people who never existed. Try checking the following link. Refresh for another portrait of someone who doesn't exist. I wonder if I click enough it will eventually show someone who looks just like me.

https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

What do they claim the point of this is? Some would say that a falsehood is a lie, which would of course get everyone's back up.....
Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: Jack Dahlgren on February 15, 2019, 01:24:16
What do they claim the point of this is? Some would say that a falsehood is a lie, which would of course get everyone's back up.....

Building all the assets of a computer game is expensive and time consuming. If you can have AI create the characters like this it has a significant impact.
Of course, humans could always create similar artwork, so what is striking is NOT the art, but the fact that a machine did it. Kind of like cameras that autofocus.

Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: CS on February 15, 2019, 01:32:19
Building all the assets of a computer game is expensive and time consuming. If you can have AI create the characters like this it has a significant impact.
Of course, humans could always create similar artwork, so what is striking is NOT the art, but the fact that a machine did it. Kind of like cameras that autofocus.

Oh, I didn't understand that your company was building computer games, i thought their building efforts were all physical. My error.
Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: Akira on February 15, 2019, 04:47:01
So, these are purely CG's?  Amazing!
Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: Jack Dahlgren on February 15, 2019, 06:02:11
So, these are purely CG's?  Amazing!

Yes, but unlike tradition CG where humans create the model and then render it using a computer, the faces and features are the result of a machine learning what a face is by viewing many many photographs. Then two networks are pitted against each other. One generates faces and the other one tells it if it is good or not, essentially training that network to generate good faces.

It gets a bit more complicated than that, but if you are interested check out the paper on this technique.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.04948.pdf (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.04948.pdf)
Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: Bent Hjarbo on February 15, 2019, 09:31:22
Fascinating  :o
Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: Frank Fremerey on February 15, 2019, 11:46:03
Researchers in my company have made it possible to create portraits of people who never existed. Try checking the following link. Refresh for another portrait of someone who doesn't exist. I wonder if I click enough it will eventually show someone who looks just like me.

https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

morphing from a database of real preople? shows when a young woman wears the skin of an old woman on her neck/throat
Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: Frank Fremerey on February 15, 2019, 11:51:15
another point is that the algorithm does not know most young women do not have shaving marks and beard stubble...
Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: Jack Dahlgren on February 15, 2019, 16:30:57
morphing from a database of real preople? shows when a young woman wears the skin of an old woman on her neck/throat

It is a bit different from morphing. Under it is not necessarily an algorithm (which presumably is made of rules and processes developed by humans) but is a neural network which was set up by a human but which develops its own understanding of images and can generate them on its own.

As for the skin of an old woman on the neck and throat, I believe the images the network was fed were primarily celebrity photos in the public domain. There is no shortage of celebrities trying very hard to keep a young face on an old body, and the machine learned this as well. The stubble on a woman’s face may also be recognition that the lines between male and female beauty may be blurry to computers these days.
Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: Bill Mellen on February 15, 2019, 17:36:11
Thanks for sharing this Jack,

I find the process fascinating.  My only quibble is that almost every image I have seen it make are of a better than average looking person  :)
Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: Frank Fremerey on February 15, 2019, 17:42:51
Jack: You mean training the network with genetic alhorithm and in the end you evaluate what the machine does for the next generation breeding? I was reporting in Adrian Thompsons pioneering work in that field 20 years ago. Only that he used hardware networks not software. The alhorithm used the analogue nature of the digital hardware and was therefore bound to the physics of the individual incarnation of the chip...
Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: Jack Dahlgren on February 15, 2019, 17:43:31
Thanks for sharing this Jack,

I find the process fascinating.  My only quibble is that almost every image I have seen it make are of a better than average looking person  :)

True. I may grab one to use as my own avatar for social media. :-)
Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: Jack Dahlgren on February 15, 2019, 17:50:55
Jack: You mean training the network with genetic alhorithm and in the end you evaluate what the machine does for the next generation breeding? I was reporting in Adrian Thompsons pioneering work in that field 20 years ago. Only that he used hardware networks not software. The alhorithm used the analogue nature of the digital hardware and was therefore bound to the physics of the individual incarnation of the chip...

Actually a GAN (generative adversarial network) uses two networks in opposition to each other. One evaluates the other. The original ideas behind this sort of thing are not new, but what has changed is that there is now sufficient data and sufficient computing power to make everything work. This is the so-called “AI Big Bang” where all three things came together to create the AI universe. Continuing the analogy we are now seeing elements combining to produce new things. Very interesting times! There will be much hype and also fear but I think this new means of computing is here to stay.
Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: Jack Dahlgren on February 15, 2019, 22:50:27
An example applied to anime...

https://twitter.com/i/status/1095131651246575616 (https://twitter.com/i/status/1095131651246575616)
Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: Akira on February 16, 2019, 01:50:06
Jack, thank you for the further explanation.  This is a stunning technology.  The application to the anime is also amazing.  The Ai seems to understand not onyl the graphics but also the artistic style.
Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: Jack Dahlgren on February 16, 2019, 03:43:39
Jack, thank you for the further explanation.  This is a stunning technology.  The application to the anime is also amazing.  The Ai seems to understand not onyl the graphics but also the artistic style.

Yes, very creepy! I almost want to feed an AI my whole database of photos and see what happens.
Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: Tom Hook on February 16, 2019, 06:41:51
Fake news, deep fake, and now this - dueling computers competing to create realistic facsimiles of human beings with the goal of making them look just like true-to-life photographs or videos of you and me or the guy next door.

Imagine that!

This new artificial reality generated on computers will someday be pervasive in the wilds of the internet put there to entertain, educate or simply beguile. This is disturbing to me no matter how well intentioned the developers might be. Call me a luddite but where is this all going? 
Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: Fons Baerken on February 16, 2019, 07:18:48
Creating people that dont exist..............
Many people dont exist........
How many that we know of?
Title: Re: Portraits of no one
Post by: pluton on February 16, 2019, 08:34:36
Creating people that dont exist..............
Many people dont exist........
How many that we know of?
One needs to frequently remind oneself that the image of the thing is not the thing.