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

Re:No kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

They used face detection algorithms to align the pictures.
The only thing we know is that the algorithm aligned the eyes, mouth, cheekbones and nose. The other features will appear at varying positions.
Had the face recognition algorithm used ears and eyebrows to align the pictures those would have been the most prominent.

You can generalize this method to anything. Take a random image and rotate, scale and align it so that it matches your reference image the best.
With a macroscopic amount of input images, even if they contain white noise you will get an image close to your reference.
If you send out a bunch of people to take pictures of shapes that they think look vaguely like your reference then you will achieve the result much faster.

This is a quite interesting study in how confirmation bias works and how it can be automated.