“Hair detection in images is useful for many applications, such as face and gender recognition, video surveillance, and hair modelling.” – prompting the development of a new Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) software application which can sort images of hair styles into straight, wavy, curly, kinky, braids, dreadlocks, and short – with an accuracy of around […]
Tag: Vision
Introducing the “Visual Muzzle” (new patent)
A new patent from inventor Yee Chong Leung of Shatin, Hong Kong provides a warm cap for a pet (say, for example a dog) – but its key feature is that it also operates as an electronic ‘Visual Muzzle’. Wearing the cap, the pet is obliged to look though goggles made of smart glass or […]
Disambiguating the Lessons from the Ambiguous-Colored Dress
Many will recall the intense Feb. 2015 internet and media storm around the ‘is-it-black/blue’ or ‘is-it-white/gold’ Tumblr dress photo. It’s now become the focus of an international group of colour scientists, who have performed the first [we believe] laboratory-based study centering around the famous photo. The team, from the universities of Granada and Extremadura in […]
Do cats see these optical illusions? Study and video say yes.
Further insight, in this study, on what cats have in sight: “Cats and Illusory Motion,” Rasmus Bååth [pictured here], Takeharu Seno, Akiyoshi Kitaoka, Psychology, vol. 5, 2014, pp. 1131-1134. The authors, at Lund University, Sweden, Kyushu University, Japan, and Ritsumeikan University, Japan, report: “Many cat owners have probably looked into their cat’s eyes and wondered how the […]
The man who drove, blinding himself, on Route 128 — for your safety
[Ig Nobel Prize winner] John Senders led a series of safety experiments in which he drove an automobile on Route 128 — the major highway that circles Boston to the west — while a visor repeatedly flapped down over his face, blinding him…. —so begins another Improbable Innovation nugget, which appears in its entirety on BetaBoston.
Failure to detect color vision in a non-malingerer
If a person insists that they are color blind, how can you prove otherwise? This was the question facing Herbert Jägle, Bettina Sadowski, Jan Kremers, Hendrik P.N. Scholl, Beate Leo-Kottler, and Lindsay T. Sharpe, who set out to devise a method. Their 2003 study was carried out as a result of a court case, in […]
Improbable on Science Friday today: upside-down vision
I’m going to be on NPR’s Science Friday program today. We’ll talk about the series of experiments that forced people to see the world upside down, left-right reversed, and other unusual ways. This segment will be at the start of hour 2 of the program. Here’s film from that experiment:
I am an eye, if I am an urchin, says Sam
Biology continues to prove itself weird almost (but not quite) beyond imagining. A press release from the University of Gothenberg, Sweden, quotes scientist Sam Dupont [pictured here, with two eyes] as saying: “We argue that the entire adult sea urchin can act as a huge compound eye, and that the shadow that is cast by […]
Who Looks Where How Often
“Gender Differences for Specific Body Regions When Looking at Men and Women,” Johannes Hewig, Ralf H. Trippe, Holger Hecht, Thomas Straube and Wolfgang H.R. Miltner, Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, vol. 32, no. 2, June 2008, pp. 67–78 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10919-007-0043-5). (Thanks to Nicole Bordes for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany, report: […]