The 30-year-old PhD student, studying electronic arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, extracts DNA from each piece of evidence she collects, focusing on specific genomic regions from her samples. She then sequences these regions and enters this data into a computer program, which churns out a model of the face of the person who left the hair, fingernail, cigarette or gum behind.
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| Image from Dewey-Hagerborg's "Stranger Visions" |
The comments in the Smithsonian article are plentiful but fall into a few categories, ranging from those firmly against the approach to many that doubt the program's accuracy. I'm not convinced, either, after seeing the comparison of Manu Sporny's 3D image (though the image of Kurt Anderson's 25 year old equivalent is pretty good). Then again, it's portrayed as art, not a highly accurate system to generate faces from DNA.
I was also left wondering about what data her method was based on, as the Smithsonian only mentioned a lab returning "about 400 base pair sequences" (Sanger sequencing?) and "about 40 or 50 different traits" that the artist is currently considering, which I thought to be SNPs.
In a blog posting last year, Dewey-Hagerborg explained the method "Stranger Visions" is based on in more detail:
I have worked with facial recognition algorithms in the past and one technique I had read about was the use of a morphable 3d facial model to attempt to recognize faces at weird angles. As I have previously turned systems like this, intended for surveillance, into systems for creativity, it naturally occurred to me that the same system could be used to generate faces. And if you can determine what correlates certain types of faces you can then generate faces with those characteristics using principal components analysis.Further on in that article, she also explains how she expanded the training data set of images to encompass a more diverse set of ethnicities to better reflect the composition of the United States. Nevertheless, it still leaves the following process in my mind: DNA --> SNPs --> Ethnicity --> Facial Features.
It turns out the research group behind the Basel Morphable Model realized this as well and after much digging I figured out how to use their matlab model as a starting point for many different types of parameters. They had already found the primary axes for gender, age and weight so the main parameter missing was ethnicity.
Without seeing more of the code used to fit the models, I have to assume that the fairly subjective parameter of 'ethnicity' sits in the middle of the information flow. The method could be dramatically improved by eliminating 'ethnicity' from the workflow by using a bigger and better set of data that correlates SNPs to facial features directly.
I'm not aware of any data sets that offer that, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it done in the next few years. As there are apparently only 14 different kinds of noses, deeper knowledge of genetics would yield a more objective predictor of facial features.
