iobound   philip mccarthy’s weblog

I ought to scribble down some words about pareidoloop (beyond those in the README at least), since it has been getting some attention recently.

Pareidoloop is a toy that makes images that approximate human faces. It starts by generating random polygons, feeding them into a computer vision face detection algorithm, and then continuing to add more polygons to increase the face detector’s “confidence” score.

Technically there’s nothing particularly interesting going on – all the hard work is done by Liu Liu’s Core Computer Vision library, which has a nice fast Javascript implementation (you can try it out here). The rest of it is just rendering random shapes, with a hill-climbing algorithm loosely based on Roger Alsing’s Evolution of Mona Lisa.

What has been interesting is people’s reactions to pareidoloop – for a quick experiment hacked together over a weekend, it has generated a lot of positive feedback and discussion. I guess this is down to the recognizable and sometimes spooky images that it generates, stimulating our primitive monkey brains’ hardwired tendency to see faces – the pareidolia from which it takes its name.