Xi'an's Og

In the July-Sept. issue of Australian Geographic, there was a story about the Facing Australia project. This is interesting from a statistical point of view since the self-description of this experiment is

“Facing Australia creates composite male and female portraits based on current Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) census data. This census data is examined, establishing the proportionate age and ethnic profile of a chosen community. Individuals from the selected community are invited to participate by having their portrait taken. These images are carefully layered to create a composite portrait of the census-determined male and female.”

Thus, those pictures are somehow representative of an “average” member of the community, in the spirit of the ideal man of the Belgian 19th Century statistician Adolphe Quételet. The Facing Australia website does not detail how the pictures are added, as in the Melbourne Football club example below. I presume they use a recentring (plus  a rescaling?) algorithm to keep the eyes focussed as well as the features of the face recognisable. Otherwise, the outcome would be too blury to make sense. The website does not either explain on which statistical basis the 50 women and the 50 men are chosen within communities. (In the case of the Melbourne Football club, all players were added.)In the end, I do wonder about the statistical relevance of the exercise even though I quite appreciate the sociological and artistic aspects. The faces obtained at different locations are after all very close (see, e.g., the series of Charles Stunt University students) and do not deliver a message about the specificity of the community thus “averaged”. In addition, some features do not add to a “human” result (as already known at the time of Quételet). For instance, adding female and male photographs or 20 year old and 70 year old photographs does not produce anything meaningfull… And the processing algorithms must erase some variability like height or bulk (even though the above picture shows a range of shoulder widths in the football players).

This entry was posted on September 19, 2009 at 12:20 am and is filed under Statistics, Travel with tags Australia, Facing Australia, Quételet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.