Leave it to the computer scientists to turn baby pictures into a
slick animation that traces faces through the years. The
technique is already being put to use on Google's Picasa photo-
sharing website as a feature called "Face Movie." "I have 10,000
photos of my 5-year-old son, taken over every possible
expression," Steve Seitz, a computer science and engineering
professor at the University of Washington and an engineer at
Google's Seattle office, said today in a news release about the
research project. "I would like to visualize how he changes over
time, be able to see all the expressions he makes, be able to
see him in 3-D or animate him from the photos." Seitz and his
colleagues have already started down that road, thanks to the
university's "Photobios" project. UW researcher Ira Kemelmacher-
Shlizerman is due to present their research next week in
Vancouver, B.C., at a meeting of the ACM Special Interest Group
on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, or SIGGRAPH.
Rapid advances in image recognition