Quantcast
ZME Science
  • News
  • Environment
  • Health
  • Future
  • Space
  • Features
    Menu
    Natural Sciences
    Health
    History & Humanities
    Space & Astronomy
    Technology
    Culture
    Resources
    Natural Sciences

    Physics

    • Matter and Energy
    • Quantum Mechanics
    • Thermodynamics

    Chemistry

    • Periodic Table
    • Applied Chemistry
    • Materials
    • Physical Chemistry

    Biology

    • Anatomy
    • Biochemistry
    • Ecology
    • Genetics
    • Microbiology
    • Plants and Fungi

    Geology and Paleontology

    • Planet Earth
    • Earth Dynamics
    • Rocks and Minerals
    • Volcanoes
    • Dinosaurs
    • Fossils

    Animals

    • Mammals
    • Birds
    • Fish
    • Reptiles
    • Amphibians
    • Invertebrates
    • Pets
    • Conservation
    • Animals Facts

    Climate and Weather

    • Climate Change
    • Weather and Atmosphere

    Geography

    Mathematics

    Health
    • Drugs
    • Diseases and Conditions
    • Human Body
    • Mind and Brain
    • Food and Nutrition
    • Wellness
    History & Humanities
    • Anthropology
    • Archaeology
    • Economics
    • History
    • People
    • Sociology
    Space & Astronomy
    • The Solar System
    • The Sun
    • The Moon
    • Planets
    • Asteroids, Meteors and Comets
    • Astronomy
    • Astrophysics
    • Cosmology
    • Exoplanets and Alien Life
    • Spaceflight and Exploration
    Technology
    • Computer Science & IT
    • Engineering
    • Inventions
    • Sustainability
    • Renewable Energy
    • Green Living
    Culture
    • Culture and Society
    • Bizarre Stories
    • Lifestyle
    • Art and Music
    • Gaming
    • Books
    • Movies and Shows
    Resources
    • How To
    • Science Careers
    • Metascience
    • Fringe Science
    • Science Experiments
    • School and Study
    • Natural Sciences
    • Health
    • History and Humanities
    • Space & Astronomy
    • Culture
    • Technology
    • Resources
  • Reviews
  • More
    • Agriculture
    • Anthropology
    • Biology
    • Chemistry
    • Electronics
    • Geology
    • History
    • Mathematics
    • Nanotechnology
    • Economics
    • Paleontology
    • Physics
    • Psychology
    • Robotics
  • About Us
    • About
    • The Team
    • Advertise
    • Contribute
    • Privacy Policy
    • Contact
No Result
View All Result
ZME Science

No Result
View All Result
ZME Science

Home → Science → News

AI can now tell if you’re a man or a woman, just by your smile

You know how everyone says 'smile' before you snap a pic? That was Skynet's plan all along!

Alexandru Micu by Alexandru Micu
March 15, 2018
in News, Robotics

Men and women have different patterns of smiling, new research reports — and this, the authors add, can allow AI to easily distinguish between the genders.

Children smiling.
Image credits Benjamin D. Glass / U.S. Navy.

Many a man has been enraptured by the right smile, and many more will probably follow — although the opposite doesn’t seem to hold true. Regardless, while romance unfolds across the world, one team of researchers from the University of Bradford is working to bring this subtle yet powerful gesture to bear in our interactions with artificial intelligence (AI). According to them, computers can learn to differentiate between men or women simply by observing a smile.

Led by Professor Hassan Ugail, the team mapped 49 distinct points (or ‘landmarks) on smiling human faces — mainly around the eyes, mouth, and down the nose. These points were then used to measure how underlying muscle movements changed the participants’ faces while smiling. These recorded changes included both the distance between different points and the ‘flow’ of the smile, i.e. how much, how far, and how fast the different landmarks moved as a person was smiling.

Birds of a gender smile together

Then, the team crunched the data to determine if ladies smile differently than gents — and they did. The team notes that there are ‘noticeable differences’ in smile-patterns between the genders, with women able to boast having the more expensive ones.

“Anecdotally, women are thought to be more expressive in how they smile,” says Ugail. “Our research has borne this out.”

“Women definitely have broader smiles, expanding their mouth and lip area far more than men.”

Based on their findings, the team created an algorithm to analyze smile patterns and tested it against video footage of 109 people as they smiled. They report that the algorithm correctly determined the gender of the smile-es in 86% of the cases — and they believe that this accuracy can be easily improved. Ugali claims the algorithms relied on “fairly simple machine classification” as they were just testing the validity of the concept; a more sophisticated AI could easily improve the recognition rates, he adds.

Automatic gender recognition is already available and in use today. But existing methods draw on static images, and compare fixed facial features. This is the first software to use dynamic movement to distinguish between men and women, and the team hopes that their work will help enhance machine learning capabilities in the long run.

However, their research has also raised some intriguing questions that they’re planning on pursuing — for example, how would their software respond to the smile of a transgender person, and how would plastic surgery impact the smiling patterns of a subject?

“Because this system measures the underlying muscle movement of the face during a smile, we believe these dynamics will remain the same even if external physical features change, following surgery for example,” said Professor Ugail.

“This kind of facial recognition could become a next-generation biometric, as it’s not dependent on one feature, but on a dynamic that’s unique to an individual and would be very difficult to mimic or alter.”

The paper “Is gender encoded in the smile? A computational framework for the analysis of the smile driven dynamic face for gender recognition” has been published in the journal The Visual Computer.

Was this helpful?


Thanks for your feedback!

Related posts:
  1. Goats can tell when you’re happy — and they like it when you smile
  2. Tell me what music you like and I’ll tell you how you think – Music preference connected to cognitive style
  3. These are the three kinds of smile, according to scientists
  4. Employees forced to smile for customers drink more, new study finds
  5. Kaspar the friendly robot – helping autistic children smile
Tags: artificial intelligencegendersmile

ADVERTISEMENT
  • News
  • Environment
  • Health
  • Future
  • Space
  • Features
  • Reviews
  • More
  • About Us

© 2007-2021 ZME Science - Not exactly rocket science. All Rights Reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • News
  • Environment
  • Health
  • Future
  • Space
  • Features
    • Natural Sciences
    • Health
    • History and Humanities
    • Space & Astronomy
    • Culture
    • Technology
    • Resources
  • Reviews
  • More
    • Agriculture
    • Anthropology
    • Biology
    • Chemistry
    • Electronics
    • Geology
    • History
    • Mathematics
    • Nanotechnology
    • Economics
    • Paleontology
    • Physics
    • Psychology
    • Robotics
  • About Us
    • About
    • The Team
    • Advertise
    • Contribute
    • Privacy Policy
    • Contact

© 2007-2021 ZME Science - Not exactly rocket science. All Rights Reserved.

Don’t you want to get smarter every day?

YES, sign me up!

Over 35,000 subscribers can’t be wrong. Don’t worry, we never spam. By signing up you agree to our privacy policy.

✕
ZME Science News

FREE
VIEW