Facial recognition software has been used to discover a possible portrait of Anne Boleyn, according to an article by Ian Sample in The Guardian.
Boleyn – a central character of the acclaimed novel Wolf Hall and its popular BBC screen adaptation – met her demise in 1536, after which all images of her were destroyed. The only sure likeness remaining is on the face of an article called the Moost Happi medal, but now researchers have found another contender in the form of a 16th-century portrait by Nidd Hall. The portrait depicts a woman wearing jewellery that had belonged to Anne Boleyn, but her true identity has been the subject of scholarly debate.
That debate has, to an extent, been settled by facial recognition technology developed by Amit Roy-Chowdhury, who leads the University of California in Riverside’s video computing group. Having been approached by an art historian to look into the matter, Roy-Chowdhury tailored his program to find the key facial features of certain individuals that would stand out in artistic representations. The system used the Moost Happi image to find a match in the Nidd Hall artwork.
Of course, this is not the same as the usual use of facial recognition technology in forensic investigations – that is, the comparison of images of real people, often for law enforcement purposes. In those situations, the technology is much more accurate and reliable. Roy-Chowdhury’s system, while impressive, is far from infallible; in scans of 57 paintings, the program found only 14 matches and was not sure about 26 others.
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February 17, 2015 – by Alex Perala
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