Not seen, the bottom part of the picture.
Posted on 12/15/2005 3:42:43 PM PST by nickcarraway
According to findings published in the New Scientist, a British journal, the exact breakdown of Mona Lisa's emotions, as captured by Leonardo da Vinci, were 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, and 2 percent angry.
The enigma of Leonardo da Vinci's famous Mona Lisa painting has been cracked with the help of emotion-recognition software from scientists at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The painting, which is now in the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, was painted at some point between 1503 and 1506, according to art historians.
After centuries of speculation about what the lady in the picture was thinking about, the software concluded that Mona Lisa was actually happy and only a little disgusted as she sat for Leonardo to paint her portrait.
Mostly Happy
According to findings published in the New Scientist, a British journal, the exact breakdown of Mona Lisa's emotions, as captured by Leonardo da Vinci, were 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, and 2 percent angry.
Dr. Nicu Sebe, a professor at the Faculty of Science of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, used emotion-recognition software to come up with the exact breakdown of Mona Lisa's emotional state.
The software was developed with the help of Professor Thomas Huang, a group leader at the Image Formation and Processing Faculty at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Read My Lips
Sibu specializes in human-computer interaction, or HCI, a technology that allows computers to respond to human beings appropriately by reading the expression on their faces. He used HCI software to create a 3D computer image of Mona Lisa.
This image was compared with images of other women in Sibu's database to quantify the emotion depicted in Leonardo's portrait.
The software looks at features such as the curvature of the lips and crinkles around the eyes to score six basic emotions. It scored Mona Lisa for happiness, disgust, fear, and anger, but found no evidence of surprise or sadness.
Other applications of emotion-recognition software might be to detect terror suspects on the basis of their emotions as well as their physical characteristics.
Professor Huang specializes in computerized image handling. He also is working on image-recognition software that will allow databases of images to be searched on the basis of their visual content rather than the textual title given to them.
Ok, but what was she happy about?
Not seen, the bottom part of the picture.
83 percent happy? Apparently Mona Lisa was not a Democrat.
"Ok, but what was she happy about?"
That you don't need a software program to figure out. There good reason why the portrait is from the hips and up. Now go figure why she's happy. LOL
Art Ping?
What time does Happy Hour start?
"were 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, and 2 percent angry"
Pretty much describes the women in my life...
Well, I'm glad that's settled, tonight I'll get a decent night's sleep.
Some people have too much time on their hands.
Christmas 2000 I took two of our daughters and a favorite niece to London and Paris for ten days (the wife had to stay home). We went to the Louvre, saw the three hour long line and in typical NY said no-f-way, went to the front and asked the semi-cute jeune-fille if there was another way in. She pointed to the Port de Leon (Lion's Gate) a block away and said 'peut etre a la'. We took the walk and found a second entrance with zero persons on line. Entering that way you encounter the Mona Lisa pdq. Our youngest stood in front of it for a good ten minutes, just staring. I was thinking, 'cool, she's got a taste for art'. Just about then she turned to me and said, "I don't get it."
Bad reporting. HCI is the entire study of how humans and computers interact on all levels, and is part of the general field of usability. It is not a piece of software.
RP, can you ping the list for this article? My computer that contains the ping list is refusing to go online.
IIRC, there was another computer program that once decided that the Mona Lisa was a self portrait of Leonardo. If so, then I suppose we can now ascribe the listed emotions to him ;-)
LOL! That was, by any standard, a perfect story. Thanks, I needed that.
I hope 0% of them are Helen Thomas or Maureen Dowd.
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