Seeing Faces in Things: A Model and Dataset for Pareidolia
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arXiv
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| Auteurs principaux: | , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Publié: |
2024
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| _version_ | 1866929513589374976 |
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| author | Hamilton, Mark Stent, Simon DuTell, Vasha Harrington, Anne Corbett, Jennifer Rosenholtz, Ruth Freeman, William T. |
| author_facet | Hamilton, Mark Stent, Simon DuTell, Vasha Harrington, Anne Corbett, Jennifer Rosenholtz, Ruth Freeman, William T. |
| contents | The human visual system is well-tuned to detect faces of all shapes and sizes. While this brings obvious survival advantages, such as a better chance of spotting unknown predators in the bush, it also leads to spurious face detections. ``Face pareidolia'' describes the perception of face-like structure among otherwise random stimuli: seeing faces in coffee stains or clouds in the sky. In this paper, we study face pareidolia from a computer vision perspective. We present an image dataset of ``Faces in Things'', consisting of five thousand web images with human-annotated pareidolic faces. Using this dataset, we examine the extent to which a state-of-the-art human face detector exhibits pareidolia, and find a significant behavioral gap between humans and machines. We find that the evolutionary need for humans to detect animal faces, as well as human faces, may explain some of this gap. Finally, we propose a simple statistical model of pareidolia in images. Through studies on human subjects and our pareidolic face detectors we confirm a key prediction of our model regarding what image conditions are most likely to induce pareidolia. Dataset and Website: https://aka.ms/faces-in-things |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_16143 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Seeing Faces in Things: A Model and Dataset for Pareidolia Hamilton, Mark Stent, Simon DuTell, Vasha Harrington, Anne Corbett, Jennifer Rosenholtz, Ruth Freeman, William T. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Artificial Intelligence Human-Computer Interaction Information Retrieval Machine Learning The human visual system is well-tuned to detect faces of all shapes and sizes. While this brings obvious survival advantages, such as a better chance of spotting unknown predators in the bush, it also leads to spurious face detections. ``Face pareidolia'' describes the perception of face-like structure among otherwise random stimuli: seeing faces in coffee stains or clouds in the sky. In this paper, we study face pareidolia from a computer vision perspective. We present an image dataset of ``Faces in Things'', consisting of five thousand web images with human-annotated pareidolic faces. Using this dataset, we examine the extent to which a state-of-the-art human face detector exhibits pareidolia, and find a significant behavioral gap between humans and machines. We find that the evolutionary need for humans to detect animal faces, as well as human faces, may explain some of this gap. Finally, we propose a simple statistical model of pareidolia in images. Through studies on human subjects and our pareidolic face detectors we confirm a key prediction of our model regarding what image conditions are most likely to induce pareidolia. Dataset and Website: https://aka.ms/faces-in-things |
| title | Seeing Faces in Things: A Model and Dataset for Pareidolia |
| topic | Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Artificial Intelligence Human-Computer Interaction Information Retrieval Machine Learning |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.16143 |