Simon Colton, Michel Valstar and
Maja Pantic
from the Department of Computing, Imperial College have won the British
Computer Society Award for the best Machine Intelligence demo. The
competition took place on Wednesday 12th December during the
SGAI International Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2008 
, held in Cambridge, UK.
The Painting Fool
The Painting Fool
is an automated painter which aims to be a creative artist in its own
right. In the demonstration, we ask for a volunteer to sit in front of
a video camera, and to express an emotion like happiness or anger, for
instance by smiling or frowning. Computer Vision software tells The
Painting Fool both where the facial features of the sitter's face are
and their emotional state. The Painting Fool paints then a unique
portrait of the sitter, using its appreciation both of the emotion
being expressed and its own abilities. It chooses a suitable colour
palette, art materials, abstraction level and painting style – which
may involve exaggerating features – to heighten the emotion in the
portrait that it produces.
Date published: 2009-01-06
