Buddhas at the Met by Parsons School of Design

Buddhas at the Met is a data visualization project studying the facial features of Met's collections of Buddha sculptures, through computer vision imaging processing. This project seeks to understand how Buddha sculptures reflect the religion's process of morphing and changing to adapt to different countries and cultures.

68 landmarks are extracted from each face. 211 out of 416 faces are successfully extracted. They are clustered in 12 different cultural regions, covering the main areas where Buddhism is commonly practiced.

Three different visualizations: face dots, lines & shapes, and face grid, are utilized to demonstrate and compare the facial features of Buddha sculptures.