Are you being judged on your smile? According to Atlantic.com we could judge people especially our elected representatives on their smiles.
How would one go about judging smiles? New facial expression recognition technology is paving the way to do just that.
Developer and journalist Dan Nguyen has taken advantage of recent facial expression recognition technology such as Face.com’s facial detection algorithm, the New York Times’ Congress API, and Sunlight Labs’ Congress API to amass images of senators in an effort to organize them according to “Face Coordinates” and then determine via those coordinates the relative smiliness of each senator’s photo.
What exactly that smiliness reveals about a person’s character is up for debate. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.
In a nut shell these programs measure proportionality of the shapes of eyes, noses, and mouths.
The project, according to Nguyen, is not really intended to help the average Joe reach a decision in regards to electing a government official, but is a teaching tool. A fun way of explaining and experimenting with programming language.
Be sure to click on the link to the original article to see various images of senator’s smiles!