Meaning behind Mona Lisa's smile scientifically cleared up (Friday 23 December, 2005)
compiled by Mary Garboden
The other day, Dutch scientist Nicu Sebe declared that Mona Lisa was 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful and 2% angry. Sebe and his colleagues in the Computer Science department at the University of Amsterdam reached this conclusion by running the famous lady's face through a computer program that can supposedly read human facial expressions. Research surrounding this concept has been going on for years, but it took the reading of a masterpiece people have wondered about for years to get much of any public attention.
The way the program works is not far off from the way humans read the expressions of others: the computer measures the degree of variation in facial features from their placement when the subject's expression is neutral. As figures in paintings cannot change, the program can only guess what a complacent Mona would look like and give an approximation. With living people, it can be put to more practical use. Among other applications of the concept, lie-detector tests and programs in cars which can detect when drivers are in danger of falling asleep are being discussed.
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| Responses so far |
| Comment 1 |
Might be just me, but I always thought that the Mona Lisa
was a portrait of the moon, you know that face that you see
on it sometimes when it's full bright and clear.....so
maybe the real question is ...what is the moon smiling at?
eh?
Ronan
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