Faces: A picture is worth more than a thousand words

Faces: A picture is worth more than a thousand words

By Lim Tri Santosa

BANDUNG (JP): We have all had the experience of running into
someone who looks familiar but whose name escapes us. It can be
embarrassing, particularly when the other person remembers us and
we may be tempted to fall back on the excuse that we're good at
memorizing faces but not names. In fact, that's true for almost
everyone.

We humans have a prodigious ability to store other human faces
in our long-term memory. Our ability to store and access those
stored images years later relies on a specialized visual ability
in the right side of the brain.

It somehow lets us memorize faces even better than other kinds
of comparable images. We develop that impressive gift through the
years and take it for granted.

Damage to the right brain may result in the loss of a person's
ability to recognize the same face from different angles or under
different lighting conditions. Face recognition must be fluid
enough that we can identify someone from different perspectives,
and through changes of hairstyle, expression, age and weight.
Since faces may be thought of as visual patterns, and since the
right hemisphere is the general locus of visual abilities, it
makes sense that facial recognition may be right-hemisphere
dependent. But there's more to it.

Composite Picture

Designed and created by the Canadian company InterQuest Inc.
(www.facesinterquest.com), Faces, The Ultimate Composite
Picture(TM) is a breakthrough composite picture software on CD-
ROM containing a database of close to 4,000 specially coded
facial features. By simply clicking on these features with the
mouse, users of all ages can create endless combinations of faces
of either sex and any race in just a few minutes. All of the
selected features are automatically blended together, making the
resulting picture look just like a black and white photograph.

Faces is a photo-realistic composite software program that
helps users create accurate composites of males, females and
youths of any ethnic group.

Composites can be built, viewed and printed in black and white
to accurately depict nose, hair, lips and eyes. It does not give
the option of making composite pictures in color. According to
InterQuest there are a few reasons for this. First, it is
virtually impossible to recreate the exact skin tone of a person.
Second, facial identification experts unanimously agree that it
is much easier to recognize a monochrome image of a face than a
color one.

Each facial feature can then be changed, sized, trimmed for
the most accurate representation of the subject. You can create
portraits of any race imaginable. Since you cannot change the
skin tone of your portrait, the race of the person you are
depicting will be determined by the features you select i.e.
eyes, nose, lips, hair, etc. Thus, with a few clicks of the
mouse, you can transform an African-American face into a Eurasian
face or into an Asian face and so on.

Faces comes in both PC and Mac versions. The PC version must
be run on Windows 95/98 or Windows NT, while the Mac version can
be run on Mac OS 7.1 or a more recent system and really needs 32
MB of RAM to function properly.

Although the program requires 680 MB of hard disk space, you
do not have to install the software to use it, you can simply run
the program from your CD-ROM drive, leaving yourself plenty of
free memory for other applications.

It is intended for everybody, which is why InterQuest sells it
at the incredibly low retail price of US$50.

Transmitting Code

A breakthrough feature of Faces is the InterCode, which allows
each composite picture to be encrypted into an ID code that is
only a few characters long. Just as every new composite picture
is an original creation, every InterCode is entirely unique, much
like a fingerprint. The supreme advantage of the InterCode is
that it allows users to obtain impeccable quality composite
pictures from other sources in a matter of seconds.

Once the InterCode is typed into the Enter InterCode dialog
box, the corresponding composite picture is automatically
generated on the user's screen. Thus, it takes nothing more than
a phone call for one Faces user to transmit a composite picture
to another Faces user, since the only information exchanged is
the InterCode. By effectively bypassing the often cumbersome
process of transmitting graphic data, this revolutionary feature
of Faces makes it possible to send perfect quality images in
almost no time.

Faces files can be saved in PIC (Macintosh) or BMP (PC)
formats, which means you can open them in any standard graphics
software like Photoshop (Adobe), PaintShop Pro or CorelDraw
(Corel), and edit them as you please. But don't forget that once
you've edited a composite picture in software other than
Faces, the InterCode will no longer work, because your picture
will no longer be a Faces document. Faces can only read files
with the face extension.

Useful Applications

Designed to develop observation skills, Faces will allow the
general public to collaborate with the police to an unprecedented
degree. By becoming better witnesses, people of all ages will be
able to participate in the fight against crime. Using the
flexible online cognitive interview, officers can quickly
construct a photographic likeness of the suspect based
on a witness' description.

This product doesn't have to be used solely to identify
criminals; it can also serve as a preventive educational tool.
While having fun recreating the faces of relatives, friends or
favorite celebrities, children and adult users are also
unconsciously developing their observation skills. This
program also has a game feature, you can set the difficulty level
and time duration to observe the face, and then you reconstruct
the face from scratch. It can also be used in a wide variety of
professional fields outside of crime prevention, including the
entertainment industry (casting agencies), the medical industry
(plastic surgery) and the beauty culture industry.

No matter what your artistic or computer skills are, every
composite picture you create turns out perfect. From the comfort
of your office or home, or even on the road or in the air, you
can create superb quality pictures and send them across the world
in seconds. Never before has a composite picture tool provided
such superior results so easily, quickly and effectively.