Lorenzo de’ Medici, probably after a model by Andrea Del Verrocchio and Orsino Benintendi, Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
FACES (Faces, Art, and Computerized Evaluation Systems) is a project that, after two years of research support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), has established proof of concept for the application of face recognition technology to works of portrait art. In the application of face recognition technology to photographed human faces, a number of difficulties are inherent in a real or perceived alteration of appearance of the face through variations in facial expression, age, angle of pose, and so on. With works of portrait art, not only do all these problems pertain, but these works also have their own additional challenges. Most notably, portrait art does not provide what might be called a photographic likeness but rather one that goes through a process of visual interpretation on the part of the artist. After establishing the initial parameters of the application of this technology, the main goal of FACES has been to test the ability of the FACES algorithm to restore lost identities to works of portrait art, something our research has shown is clearly feasible. Our work has also suggested a number of other potential applications, both using the FACES algorithm and employing basic concept of FACES in an altered form.
Conrad Rudolph is Professor of Art History, University of California, Riverside. His recent books include Pilgrimage to the End of the World: The Road to Santiago de Compostela (University of Chicago Press, 2004), “First, I Find the Center Point”: Reading the Text of Hugh of Saint Victor’s The Mystic Ark (American Philosophical Society, 2005), A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), and The Mystic Ark: Hugh of St Victor, Art, and Thought in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2014). He is Principal Investigator and Project Director for FACES (Faces, Art, and Computerized Evaluation Systems), a pioneering attempt to apply face recognition technology to works of art, specifically portraiture, 2012-2014 (funded through the National Endowment for the Humanities).
Date: Tuesday June 2 2015 | 6:00pm – 7:15pm
Venue: The William Macmahon Ball Theatre, Ground Floor, Old Arts Building, The University of Melbourne
PARKVILLE VIC 3010
Free to attend, but registration essential – register here.
This public lecture is one of the keynote talks for the Faces of Emotion collaboratory organised by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.