With his flowing locks, long beard, and worn robes, Jesus is one of the most instantly recognisable figures in the Western world. So it comes as no surprise that his face is also regularly spotted in inanimate objects. This is due to'face pareidolia' - a common brain phenomenon in which a person sees faces in random images or patterns. 'Sometimes we see faces that aren't really there,' explained Robin Kramer, Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology, at University of Lincoln, in an article for The Conversation. 'You may be looking at the front of a car or a burnt piece of toast when you notice a face-like pattern. 'This is called face pareidolia and is a mistake made by the brain's face detection system.'

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 humanannotated 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.

From angry handbags to washing machines in distress, humans see faces in all sorts of inanimate objects – a peculiar phenomenon known as'face pareidolia'. Now, researchers in Maryland have found that these faces are more likely to perceived as young and male than old and female. The academics tested nearly 4,000 volunteers with photos to stimulate pareidolia, including images of an'alarmed' teapot, a'relaxed' potato and a'disgusted' green apple on a branch. Participants perceived illusory faces as having a specific emotional expression, age and gender, but they were mostly perceived as young and male by both men and women. Researchers weren't sure why this was, although it's possible humans are more prone to seeing men because we were more exposed to male faces during our earliest stages of development.