Lie to me: reading hidden emotions

Microexpressions magnified at different levels IEEE researchers have studied micro-expressions: rapid, involuntary facial expressions which reveal emotions that people do not intend to show. This is of extreme importance in forensic science and psychotherapy, and we all remember the TV show Lie to me, which focused on these micro-expressions (MEs). Unlike the pompous TV shows, real-life […]

How to predict cuteness

“Cuteness” is a concept that received lots of attention not only from the vast population of the Internet, but from psychologists and neurologists as well. For example, usually brain activity (using fMRI, like in work of Kim and Hamann) is greater when the stimulus has infant-like characteristics, like big eyes, fat cheeks, or a large […]

Rolling in the deep: tracking zebrafish behavior

Neuroscientists and biologists have investigated zebrafish for quite a while, since they have much more in common than meets the eye. There is, of course, one obvious difference: they move in three dimensions while swimming. Therefore, it was interesting to track fish to collect information about the third dimension of depth, which is usually missing […]

Learning new tricks from old dogs: canine gaze tracking

Researchers from the University of Helsinki investigated the similarities and differences in people and dog gazing in interaction. There were various independent studies focusing on canine gazing, but this is the first study that did the comparisons under very similar condition, focusing on dogs’ visual attention in social scenes. The researchers tracked and recorded the eye […]

What dress goes with these shoes? Ask a computer!

Today’s world of users active on social media produces millions of photos every day, and a subset of these includes a large number of clothing and accessories. Computer vision researchers decided to use machine learning algorithms to answer the old question: “What outfit goes well with this pair of shoes?”. The required concept is learning […]

Smoothed criminals: identifying real faces from retouched mugshots

One of new challenges for face identification system is a problem of the identification of a face from heavily altered facial images. Such a system can be useful in, for example, mugshot identifications for criminal identification. In a recent study, researchers used frontal views and compared them to “photoshopped” ones generated by face transformation online […]

Seeing with Humans: Gaze-Assisted Neural Image Captioning

Gaze tracking uses human gaze data for various applications in computer-vision systems, since gaze reflects how humans process visual scenes. Recently, researchers from Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrucken wanted to know whether gaze data can also be beneficial for scene-centric tasks, such as image captioning. They presented a new perspective on gaze-assisted image captioning using […]

When I’m sixty-four: face aging

Age progression or age synthesis (face aging) is defined as aesthetically rendering a face image with natural aging and rejuvenating effects for a certain face of an individual.