Tuesday, May 25, 2010

my average face && second half marathon

In case you didn't know, Picasa now performs face recognition in your photos.  I found it amusing to see the progression of my own face over the past several years.  Picasa lets you extract these face tiles into an 'export' directory, and it is trivial to load them up in Matlab for additional fun.  I produced some TorralbaArt by averaging over 400 faces of myself (with no alignment whatsoever) collected over the past several years.  These photos come from my personal photo collection, so I'm not making them publicly available.  But here's the average face!  I resized all images to 500x500 before averaging and resized the average to the mean aspect ratio of all images.  The "black-eyes" come from the fact that I was wearing black sunglasses in about 10% of the photos.

On another note, I ran the Pittsburgh Half Marathon this year.  This was my second half marathon ever -- my first one was last summer in San Francisco.  This time, my finishing time was 1hour 40 minutes, which happens to be the goal I set for myself (10 minutes faster than my SF time).  The first 20 minutes I was passing everybody in front of me since it was quite crowded.  I could probably shave another 2-3 minutes off if I start towards the front of the herd, but I'll need some serious training if I'm going to reach 1:30 in a future race.  I might even run a full marathon one of these days...

2 comments:

  1. You can create the average face image from inside Picasa as well. Select person > Collage Maker > Blend multiple exposures.

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  2. Oh nice! Thanks for the tip. I was actually using these faces for something else, so I had to read them into Matlab anyways. But its good to know that Picasa can do the averaging.

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