First it has just become possible. That means it is already feasible. A sketch artist already has a start point and what is vastly important he has a fine interpretive mind to assist the conversion. All that means even in the early days a better rendering. We even know the basics without having to ask a question.
This will find
its way into forensic science quickly.
It is simply too obviously useful.
It will also steadily improve.
Better it can quickly be adapted to presort mug shots. Just losing the thousands clearly not
relevant is a giant leap forward.
So saying that
this is for the distant future is misleading at best. We can already use computers to identify
you. Now imagine a computer generated
blurry image drawn from the facial interactions of a witness. This is all happening in the software and the
possibility of collecting a valid list becomes good enough.
We know what
you’re thinking: Scientists find a way to read minds
Published March 28, 2014
FoxNews.com
Think mind reading is science fiction?
Think again.
Scientists have used brain scanners to detect and
reconstruct the faces that people are thinking of, according to a a study accepted for publication this month in the journal NeuroImage.
In the study, scientists hooked participants up to
an fMRI brain scanner – which determines activity in different parts of the
brain by measuring blood flow – and showed them images of faces. Then, using
only the brain scans, the scientists were able to create images of the faces
the people were looking at.
“It is mind reading,” said Alan S. Cowen, a graduate
student at the University of California Berkeley who co-authored the study with
professor Marvin M. Chun from Yale and Brice A. Kuhl from New York University.
'You can even imagine, way down the road, a witness
to a crime might want to come in and reconstruct a suspect’s face.'
- Alan S. Cowen, a graduate student at the
University of California Berkeley
The study says it is the first to try to reconstruct
faces from thoughts. The photos above are the actual photos and reconstructions
done in the lab.
While the reconstructions based on 30 brain readings
are blurry, they approximate the true images. They got the skin color right in
all of them, and 24 out of 30 reconstructions correctly detected the presence
or absence of a smile.
The brain readings were worse at determining gender
and hair color: About two-thirds of the reconstructions clearly detected the
gender, and only half got hair color correct.
“There’s definitely room for improvement,” Cowen
said, adding that these experiments were conducted two years ago, though they
only recently were accepted for publication. He said he and others have been
working on improving the process in the interim.
“I’m applying more sophisticated mathematical models
[to the brain scan results], so the results should get better,” he said.
To tease out faces based on brain activity, the
scientists showed participants in the study 300 faces while recording their
brain activity. Then they showed the participants 30 new faces and used their
previously recorded patterns to create 30 images based only on their brain
scans.
Once the technology improves, Cowen said, applications
could range from better understanding mental disorders, to recording dreams, to
solving crimes.
“You can see how people perceive faces depending on
different disorders, like autism – and use that to help diagnose therapies,” he
said.
That’s because the reconstructions are based not on
the actual image, but on how the image is perceived by a subject’s brain. If an
autistic person sees a face differently, the difference will show up in the
brain scan reconstruction.
Images from dreams are also detectable.
“And you can even imagine,” Cowen said, “way down
the road, a witness to a crime might want to come in and reconstruct a
suspect’s face.”
How soon could that happen?
“It really depends on advances in brain imaging
technology, more so than the mathematical analysis. It could be 10, 20 years
away.”
One challenge is that different brains show
different activity for the same image. The blurry images pictured here are
actually averages of the thoughts of six lab volunteers. If one were to look at
any individual’s reading, the image would be less consistent.
“There’s a wide variation in how people’s brains
work under a scanner – some people have better brains for fMRI – and so if you
were to pick a participant at random it might be that their reconstructions are
really good, or it might be that their reconstructions are really poor, which
is why we averaged across all the participants,” Cowen said.
For now, he added, you shouldn’t worry about others
snooping on your memories or forcibly extracting information.
“This sort of technology can only read active parts
of the brain. So you couldn’t read passive memories – you would have to get the
person to imagine the memory to read it,” Cowen said.
“It’s a matter of time, and eventually – maybe 200 years
from now – we’ll have some way of reading inactive parts of the brain. But
that’s a much harder problem, as it involves measuring very fine details of
brain structure that we don’t even really understand.”
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