Pareidolia

While experimenting with the facial feature detector in Quartz Composer, I thought about how humans often see faces in inanimate objects. After some research I discovered that once again, someone had defined this phenomenon. On the Pareidolia Wikipedia page there are some great examples of the phenomenon in both natural and artificial objects along with the full definition:

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records when played in reverse.

I began constructing a Quartz composition that would scan photographs for faces. After testing the composition with my own photographs, I decided to use the RSS Importer patch to download the latest photos from Flickr and scan the images for faces. The Composition then displays the images detected for the viewer to see. As of now, the Composition works as intended; however, I have been looking into the best way to encourage the Composition to display only faces in artificial object. I’m thinking this could be accomplished through the use of a specific search tag or image filter that can determine rather or not the scanner is detecting a human face or not.