gray-LookingOutwards1

Generating Human Faces From Sliders

Generating-Faces

This is a machine learning application that has been given a database of high school yearbooks and learned to generate yearbook photos based on what it has decided are the most important components of these photos. Some of these components can be easily identified and labeled, meaning that theoretically, with some fine-tuning, unique faces could be generated given gender, hair color, height, complexion, etc. The application was developed CodeParade, who is a self-described software hobbyist. This program is showcased on their Youtube channel, and is available for anyone to download.

This project was especially impressive to me because despite the fact that it's just a single developer exploring an idea that they're interested in, the product actually works surprisingly well, and it's pretty fun to play with. It seems like CodeParade is genuinely curious about the projects that they do, and they put serious effort into it. I think this project is a really novel and somewhat intuitive way to showcase and experiment with this aspect of machine learning (auto encoders). They've actually put the project online since I last looked at it: http://codeparade.net/faces/. I really appreciate that they made the code open source and available. It would also be interesting to see what most people think of as the most important components of a human face, and compare those with what the computer thinks. CodeParade has also applied this program to other datasets, such as Garfield comics and names of classes. Check out their website (http://codeparade.net) and the video introducing this project:

Computer Generates Human Faces