Korean Beauty Contestants – Face Morphing

I wonder whether this analysis supports the assertion that these were photoshopped?<p><a href="http://kotaku.com/blame-photoshop-for-koreas-beauty-queen-clones-482285894" rel="nofollow">http://kotaku.com/blame-photoshop-for-koreas-beauty-queen-cl...</a>

It's worrying how this keeps getting upvoted despite having been debunked before it even hit HN, and the top comments on both HN and the original post pointing to the article that debunks it.<p>This is one scenario in which HN could really use downvotes.

All I see is lots of makeup. Might it more accurately be called a Korean Face Art Contest?<p>But really, if we're trying to compare physical beauty, wouldn't the contest require 0 modification of it? This would likely include banning makeup, any form of plastic surgery, unnatural hair modifications, and clothing that is overly supportive. Is there even such a thing? A cursory Google search suggests no. Even so called "natural beauty pageants" apparently permit caked on makeup, fake hair, fake teeth (not just orthodontics), etc. I don't see a point to these beauty contests, in that case. They say nothing about the person at all.

neat, but eigenfaces is really overplayed and outdated, there's lots of better face recognition algorithms that can handle a bit of distortion/deformation that really plagues principal component methods

I do recall a certain cynical Korean friend of mine quipping, "girls who go to the same plastic surgeon look more similar than their own sisters"

When you look at them individually they don't look very similar. It's mainly the makeup that highlights the same parts of their faces so when they're flashed all together (eyes in the same spot) it wrongly appears they all look the same.

The background of the post aside, I find the main idea interesting and fun. Whatever the validity of the original argument is, I don't think the goal was to actually prove it, but more to play with maths and code to do something cool.

"Recognition" should be replaced by "Morphing" in title.<p>Currently it makes no sense.

So... like even in the of-course-it-is-what-are-you-completely-naive photoshopped press photos, they don't really look that similar?

South korea has a far lower genetic diversity then a lot of european countries, and America for sure. In a totally non-racist way, the "all look same" stereotype may have more truth than it does for a lot of other countries.

"Here we can see that the eigenvalues vanish after 7, suggesting that the rank of the image data is 6."<p>Does this mean there are only 6 different faces shared among the 20 girls?

It's all in good spirit, but I can't help to note that it wreeks of the old racist trope "all &#60;insert ethnicity&#62; look the same" <a href="http://healthland.time.com/2010/11/24/they-all-look-the-same-how-racism-works-neurologically/" rel="nofollow">http://healthland.time.com/2010/11/24/they-all-look-the-same...</a><p>And perhaps also a bit sexist? I dunno, maybe I'm overly sensitive.

I suspect it helps that these women are absolutely caked in makeup. Plus, averaging out pictures? It gave them an afro. How many Koreans wear afros?

Small correction: I saw this somewhere on the web yesterday, and it turns out that these are Miss Taegu contestants, not Miss Korea.

Even with caked makeup and extremely photoshopped pictures they dont even look that similar.