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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.
So, average a bunch of things that only have their resemblance to a human face in common, and you end up with a human face? I didn't see that coming.
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.
Wait, so, when images that looked more like faces were used, the average looked more like a human face? Just crazy.
It's cute, but I'm not sure it's particularly profound.
Your blogspam links to Forbes is offensive.
Stop linking a website that is designed to broke hyperlinks and to force through an ad page.
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.
Whenever I see a Forbes link redirect to forbes.com/forbes/welcome, I click back (page doesn't even need to fully load) and click the link again. The second time it goes straight to the target. Works with both Firefox and Chrome w/ ABP.
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.
I really hate to contribute to the hate noise the haters bring, but I really hate to visit websites that hate to let me see the site without allowing scripting I hate from dozens of hated sources.
Could we get some kind of automated indicator when a link points at a site that just won't load with NoScript?
I don't think I am a tinfoil hat paranoid, I just don't like to have to allow 17 different sites to run scripts in my browser just to read an article. After reading a few comments it looks like I didn't miss much this time.
"Proximity to wonder has blunted our perception and appreciation of it" --Tim Hartnell in 'Exploring ARTIFICIAL INTELLI
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].
Essentially, this method should show what kind of traits look like faces to us rather than what real human faces look like. It's exploring properties of the psychovisual system of humans, not properties of face detection algorithms or statistical human faces.