A new search service allows you to see yourself in another era, change your age or just pick up a hairstyle

When we look for a new hairstyle for ourselves, we always try to understand how we will look after going to the hairdresser. Sometimes you just want to present yourself in the style characteristic of the 30s or 70s of the last century. Sometimes there is a desire to find out how we will look in the future - say, in 50 or 70 years. Or what our children will look like in 10 years.

Of course, you can fulfill your wish. But for this you need to either seek help from a graphic design specialist, or spend your own free time. Now there is a third way - this is the Dreambit service, which will do everything on its own. The search engine was developed by experts at Washington University, and it can replace almost any person from a photo from the Internet with a photo of any other person. Replacement is not a single item here - the uploaded photo will be substituted for all the photos found on the request for “curly hair” or “people of the 30s”.


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You can search for photos in a variety of categories, including places, times, looks, etc.

The presentation of the service will be made at the largest annual conference dedicated to computer graphics and interactive technologies SIGGRAPH 2016 . Now access to Dreambit is available only on request, but this year it is planned to make it accessible to all.



The work of the service is based on the research of specialists of Washington University in the field of face recognition, age-related changes and computer graphics and some other areas. All research results are now integrated into a single whole.

Researchers say that Dreambit may be useful to many - both ordinary people and scientists, police, computer graphics specialists, actors and directors. For example, a service can show how a child who is one year old will look when he is 10, 15, 30, 40 and 60.



By processing a photo of a child, the service can show how an adult with different hairstyles will look like. Dreambit can show and the person possessing nowadays magnificent hair with no hair at all.

“It’s pretty hard to imagine any of us with a different hairstyle ... In the case of missing children, it’s necessary to demonstrate how the child looks with a different hairstyle, being several years older. Only age-related processing or changing the hairstyle is not enough, ”says the project manager.



This tool may also be useful for directors looking for an actor or actress for a new film. Dreambit will show this person in any style. An example is the processing of Cate Blanchett's photographs for the film “I'm Not There” with Bob Dylan. Dylan is replaced by Blanchett here.



Now imagine all the ways to use the new service is quite difficult. Dreambit can be useful to an extremely wide range of users.

The search service, when processing a photo uploaded by a user, does not only search by the specified criteria. Dreambit tries to select images that are suitable for replacing the face, sifting out all other photos. Initially, the service "cuts out" the user's face from the original image, and substitutes it on all suitable photos, performing the replacement very accurately. The database search service - hundreds of thousands of images from which you can make your own sample. But this is only after the service itself becomes available to all.