Composites of Greek and European Female Athletes

Composites of Greek and European Female Athletes

by Dienekes Pontikos

Methods

In the Composite Greek Woman, an average of 16 Greek actresses, singers, politicians, and tv presenters were averaged to create an overall composite. In a new experiment, 15 female Greek volleyball players were morphed into a single composite using Sqirlz Morph 1.2e. All women with Greek names from Panathinaikos and Panellinios volleyball clubs were used. Pairwise averaging was not used in this case, but Sqirlz Morph constructed a single average from all 15 input images. Morphing was also applied to sets of 16 women from 12 different European groups, comprising of Torino 2006 Winter Olympic athletes. The 16 first (alphabetically) females from each group were selected. Examples whose face was rotated excessively away from frontal view -defined as rotation that obscured one of the nasal wings- were dismissed. Individuals whose hair obscured a substantial part of their face were also dismissed. Finally, individuals of obvious foreign origin, were also dismissed. None of the Balkan countries could provide 16 individuals on their own, so Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro, FYRO Macedonia, and Bulgaria were pooled to form a "Balkan Slav" group. For the same reason, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia were pooled to form a "Baltic" group.
All the final composite images were cropped to contain mainly the head, and resized to a height of 200 pixels. Subsequently the Sharpen More and One Step Photo Fix filter in Jasc Pain Shop Pro v. 9 was applied. It should be noted that differences in pigmentation should not be inferred from these composites, since original picture collections differed greatly in lighting and contrast conditions. At most, the pictures should be interpreted as shape averages of a large collection of accomplished female athletes from the different groups.

Results

The 15 original Greek volleyball players are pictured below.

The Greek composite picture is given below.

The European composite pictures are given below: 1. Swedish 2. Russian 3. Polish 4. German 5. Czech 6. British 7. Balkan Slav 8. Austrian 9. French 10. Finnish 11. Italian 12. Baltic.