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.

Comments

Not random: Faces Aligned and Similarly Sized

[Roger W Moore]

Combinging 50 sounds which sound like a bird might not sound very birdlike. You might end up with some kind of white noise.

Probably true but I bet if you took images of human faces which were not already aligned and not all zoomed to a similar size then that too would generate noise. The only reason the averaging works is because people naturally take photos with the face the right way up and zoomed to a similar size. I bet if you were allowed to do the same alignment and scaling for bird song you could average the now aligned audio to get something like birdsong.

This is why this result is so obvious and not at all what it says. These are not random face-like images but ones with the same alignment and comparable zoom factor. If I did the same for any shape I would get the same result: the details of the shape would blur but the basic shape would remain the same because they are all aligned and have similar sizes. Someone should nominate this for an ignobel prize.