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Averaging Inanimate Objects Together Produces a Very Human Face
StartsWithABang writes: It's well known that by aligning and averaging a wide variety of human faces together, an eerie "average" human face can be arrived at. But we see faces in things all the time, from natural scenes like terrain to artificial ones like cars, coffeemakers and combination locks. For the first time, someone averaged together a large number of images of objects appearing to have faces, and the result, strikingly, was an eerily human face. You'd think this might say more about the algorithm than the images themselves, but when noise was used, no human face emerged at all.
Did the rest of the world suddenly get dumb?
Here averaging is basically:
What's common amongst all/most of these images that look like a face?
Yes, it's something that looks like a face. Shocked, I tell you.
But can you can average pictures of Jesus to get toast? Perhaps the feeding of the five thousand is a distorted recollection of an image processing course. My theologian friend always tells me a lot is lost in translation.
Next thing you'll be telling me that when you average 50 photos of assholes you'll come up with something that looks remarkably like [pick your favourite politician].