Portrait – Discovering centric figure(s) of movies using facial recognition

Facial recognition software has been around for some time but like in the cases of  Cloud Face and Google Faces, the most interesting results come from when artists “misuse” algorithms to discover what the human eye can’t see or our brains simply can’t compute.

Created by Shinseungback Kimyonghun (Shin Seung Back and Kim Yong Hun) using Processing and a facial recognition algorithm via openCV, ‘Portrait’ is a series of digital portraits representing an identity (or a face) of a movie. Shin and Kim created custom software that detects faces from every 24 frames of a movie, and creates an average face of all found faces. These faces are layered to produce an “average” / centric figure(s) and the visual mood of the movie.

Movies used include Avatar, Mission: Impossible, Black Swan, The Matrix, Amélie, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and others.

Avatar, Portrait (face averaging process), 2013. Shinseungback Kimyonghun.