15 seconds of fame — an interactive, computer-vision based art installation Franc Solina Peter Peer Borut Batagelj Samo Juvan University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Computer and Information Science Trˇ zaˇ ska 25, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia E-mail: franc.solina@fri.uni-lj.si Abstract “15 seconds of fame 1 ” is an interactive art installation which elevates the face of a randomly selected gallery visitor for 15 seconds into a “work of art”. The in- stallation was inspired by Andy Warhol’s statement that “In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes ” as well as by the pop-art style of his works. The installation consists of a computer with a flat-panel monitor, a digital camera and proprietary software that can detect human faces in images and graphically transform them. In this paper we present the technical background of the installation, in particular, how computer vision techniques were applied in this art installation. 1 Introduction Technology influenced artistic production through- out history. In the later part of the 20th century the fast advent of computer and information technology in particular left a strong impression in the art world [3, 12]. The Computer vision laboratory at University of Ljubljana collaborates with the Video and New Me- dia Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana by supporting artistic creativity using In- ternet, teleoperation and web cameras since 1995 [1, 2, 11]. The installation described in this paper was envisioned by Franc Solina in 1996 when more reliable computer vision methods capable of detect- ing human faces in images started to appear and im- plemented in 2002 with the help of his graduate stu- dents. The idea for the installation “15 seconds of fame” was inspired by Andy Warhol’s celebrated statement that “Inthefutureeverybodywillbeworldfamousfor fifteen minutes ” and his photography derived paint- ings of famous people. Warhol took faces and per- 1 This work was supported by the Ministry of Edu- cation, Science and Sports of the Republic of Slovenia (Program Computer Vision 1539-506) sons from mass media, banal in their newspaper ev- erydayness, and transformed them into painting by performing some kind of color surgery on them. By separating the face from the background or selecting distinct facial features (i.e. mouths, eyes, hair) he ob- tained image areas which he highlighted or covered with paint. Warhol portrayed in this fashion celebri- ties from politics and the arts (i.e. Mao-Tse Toung, Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, etc.). Some of these images are true icons of the 20th century. The installation “15 seconds of fame” intends to make instant celebrities out of common people by putting their portraits on the museum wall. Instead of providing 15 minutes of fame as prophesied by Warhol we decided to shorten this time to 15 sec- onds to make the installation more dynamic. This time frame also limits the time necessary for com- puter processing of each picture. Since the individ- ual portraits which are presented by the installation are selected by chance out of many faces of people who are standing in front of the installation, the in- stallation tries to convey that fame tends to be not only short-lived, but also random. Figure 1: Flat-panel computer monitor dressed up like a precious painting. The round opening above the picture is for the digital camera lens. The visible part of the “15 seconds of fame” in-