Mutation 4

This image is an example that was built from a spatially normalized stack of portrait virus images. By spatial normalization i mean that every painted portrait was spatially warped to a standard portrait facial position. The standard position was just one portrait that i randomly picked out of the 2010 Siggraph portrait virus set. Every other portrait was spatially warped to match the standard position. I'll discuss the mechanics of that process at a later time. The resulting image was generated with the temporal rank filter and can be thought of as the average of all of the portrait virus images. So you could think of it as the generic portrait derived from the entire set.

I've generated another image below that uses the same process, but with the original non-spatially normalized portraits as the input stack. Note that it's much more of a blur and doesn't capture as much of the facial distinctions and detailing of the overall set of portraits.



It does tell us something about the overall set of original portraits (from the standpoint of visualization analysis), mainly that in average the faces do tend to be centered. And for some temporal processing effects that spatial variation of the individual portraits can lead to visually interesting results. But for other processing effects working with the spatially normalized image set can lead to very different results.