Faces in places: humans and machines make similar face detection errors.

ABSTRACT: The human visual system seems to be particularly efficient at detecting faces. This efficiency sometimes comes at the cost of wrongfully seeing faces in arbitrary patterns, including famous examples such as a rock configuration on Mars or a toast's roast patterns. In machine vision, face detection has made considerable progress and has become a standard feature of many digital cameras. The arguably most wide-spread algorithm for such applications ("Viola-Jones" algorithm) achieves high detection rates at high computational efficiency. To what extent do the patterns that the algorithm mistakenly classifies as faces also fool humans? We selected three kinds of stimuli from real-life, first-person perspective movies based on the algorithm's output: correct detections ("real faces"), false pos

SUBMITTER: 't Hart BM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3187842 | biostudies-literature | 2011

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature