Jodi Long was caught off guard by the cage filled with cameras meant to capture images of her face and body. "I was a little freaked out because, before I walked in there, I said I don't remember this being in my contract," the actor said. The filmmakers needed her digital scan, Long was told, because they wanted to make sure her arms were positioned correctly in a scene where she holds a computer-generated character. That moment in 2020 stuck with Long, president of SAG-AFTRA's Los Angeles local, while she was negotiating for protections around the use of artificial intelligence when actors went on strike. In November, the actors guild reached a deal with Hollywood studios that -- among other things -- required consent and compensation for the use of a worker's digital replica.

Character re-identification, recognizing characters consistently across different panels in comics, presents significant challenges due to limited annotated data and complex variations in character appearances. To tackle this issue, we introduce a robust semi-supervised framework that combines metric learning with a novel 'Identity-Aware' self-supervision method by contrastive learning of face and body pairs of characters. Our approach involves processing both facial and bodily features within a unified network architecture, facilitating the extraction of identity-aligned character embeddings that capture individual identities while preserving the effectiveness of face and body features. This integrated character representation enhances feature extraction and improves character re-identification compared to re-identification by face or body independently, offering a parameter-efficient solution. By extensively validating our method using in-series and inter-series evaluation metrics, we demonstrate its effectiveness in consistently re-identifying comic characters. Compared to existing methods, our approach not only addresses the challenge of character re-identification but also serves as a foundation for downstream tasks since it can produce character embeddings without restrictions of face and body availability, enriching the comprehension of comic books. In our experiments, we leverage two newly curated datasets: the 'Comic Character Instances Dataset', comprising over a million character instances and the 'Comic Sequence Identity Dataset', containing annotations of identities within more than 3000 sets of four consecutive comic panels that we collected.

Companies that offer surveillance cameras are increasingly implementing software that uses artificial intelligence to identify people based off their face and body type. See how the AI in Briefcam works.

You've probably met people who are experts at mastering their emotions and understanding the emotions of others. When all hell breaks loose, somehow these individuals remain calm. They know what to say and do when their boss is moody or their lover is upset. It's no wonder that emotional intelligence was heralded as the next big thing in business success, potentially more important than IQ, when Daniel Goleman's bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence, arrived in 1995. After all, whom would you rather work with--someone who can identify and respond to your feelings, or someone who has no clue? Whom would you rather date?