ENLIGHTEN3D

by Joshua Koopferstock

Unless you are Haley Joel Osment, odds are you possess 5 senses.  On this blog, we are focused on how computers can interpret one of those senses, vision.  It’s the field where we have our technical expertise, and where we believe we can make our biggest contribution to technological advancement (see our current R&D project to turn photos to 3D models).  However, in the same way that computer vision scientists are trying to help machines understand what they see, the researchers over at mufin are trying to teach computers how to hear.

mufin is an automated music recommendation system that takes a different, one could say more technical, approach to helping you find music that you like.  Services like Pandora and iTunes Genius use human expertise or song meta-data where mufin actually analyzes the audio content.  This is from the mufin website:

How does mufin work?

mufin knows the musical essence of millions of songs and connects those songs that have a similar essence. This essence consists of sound properties like tempo, instruments, sound density or harmony. Whether the music is well-known or not, which genre it belongs to, when it was released or where in the world it was made, plays no role when you discover music using mufin. What matters is the sound!

Much like those of us in Computer Vision, Computer Audition scientists sit at the meeting point between art and mathematics.  As effectively as Computer Audition algorithms can objectively break down music into a series of variables, it requires a subjective human to determine which combination of those variables implies a “similar” song.  It is this subjectivity that keeps both of our fields fascinating.

Though the early reviews of this site seem to be not entirely positive, the folks over at mufin already have my respect for taking a stab at a truly complex problem.  Whether mufin succeeds or not, I expect to see Computer Audition techniques applied in other music recommendation services in the future, though undoubtedly in combination with other, more manual, techniques rather than in isolation.

By Joshua Koopferstock

Who hasn’t always dreamed of having a $2000 sculpture of their own head?  I know I have.  And finally, thatsmyface.com will make this dream come true.  With the upload of 2 photos of your face, one in front view and one in profile, thatsmyface.com will reconstruct a 3D model of your head in a semi-automatic fashion. This is a pretty neat attempt to bring a computer vision & 3D technology to the consumer market.

The technology behind the site is nothing new.  I can’t say for sure, but I would be willing to bet that thatsmyface.com is using FaceGen technology, which has been around for 10 years.

Similar?

Still, you don’t need cutting edge technology AND an exciting product to make a successful business; one of the two will usually do just fine.  Thatsmyface.com now just needs to convince people that what they’ve always wanted was random gear with their head as the main feature.  For the sake of entrepreneurship, good luck to them!