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.