Thursday, June 29, 2017

"Researchers Perfectly Reconstruct Faces by Reading Brainwaves"

From Shelly Fan's 6-14-17 SingularityHub article entitled "Forget Police Sketches:  Researchers Perfectly Reconstruct Faces by Reading Brainwaves":

"Picture this: you’re sitting in a police interrogation room, struggling to describe the face of a criminal to a sketch artist. You pause, wrinkling your brow, trying to remember the distance between his eyes and the shape of his nose.
"Suddenly, the detective offers you an easier way: would you like to have your brain scanned instead, so that machines can automatically reconstruct the face in your mind’s eye from reading your brain waves?
"Sound fantastical? It’s not. After decades of work, scientists at Caltech may have finally cracked our brain’s facial recognition code. Using brain scans and direct neuron recording from macaque monkeys, the team found specialized 'face patches' that respond to specific combinations of facial features.
"Like dials on a music mixer, each patch is fine-tuned to a particular set of visual information, which then channel together in different combinations to form a holistic representation of every distinctive face.
"The values of each dial were so predictable that scientists were able to recreate a face the monkey saw simply by recording the electrical activity of roughly 200 brain cells. When placed together, the reconstruction and the actual photo were nearly indistinguishable.
"'This was mind-blowing,' says lead author Dr. Doris Tsao."
To read Shelly Fan's entire article, click HERE.

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