Straight, wavy, curly, kinky, braids, dreadlocks, and short hairstyles – computationally sorted [study]

“Hair detection in images is useful for many applications, such as face and gender recognition, video surveillance, and hair modelling.” – prompting the development of a new Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) software application which can sort images of hair styles into straight, wavy, curly, kinky, braids, dreadlocks, and short – with an accuracy of around […]

Disambiguating the Lessons from the Ambiguous-Colored Dress

Many will recall the intense Feb. 2015 internet and media storm around the ‘is-it-black/blue’ or ‘is-it-white/gold’ Tumblr dress photo. It’s now become the focus of an international group of colour scientists, who have performed the first [we believe] laboratory-based study centering around the famous photo. The team, from the universities of Granada and Extremadura in […]

Do cats see these optical illusions? Study and video say yes.

Further insight, in this study, on what cats have in sight: “Cats and Illusory Motion,” Rasmus Bååth [pictured here], Takeharu Seno, Akiyoshi Kitaoka, Psychology, vol. 5, 2014, pp. 1131-1134. The authors, at Lund University, Sweden, Kyushu University, Japan, and Ritsumeikan University, Japan, report: “Many cat owners have probably looked into their cat’s eyes and wondered how the […]

Improbable Research