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General Psychology Science Fair Project

Digital Noise and Face Recognition

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Digital Noise and Face Recognition | Science Fair Projects | STEM Projects
How much digital noise can you add to a face before it becomes unrecognizable? Digital noise is the grainy dots you see in a bad photo. Some faces are easy to spot through heavy grain. Others vanish quickly. You take nine celebrity photos and add layers of noise using a photo editing app. Volunteers view the noisiest version first. If they cannot name the person, you show a slightly cleaner version. You keep going until they identify the face or see the original. The amount of noise each person needs removed depends on the celebrity's features.

Hypothesis

The hypothesis is that the presence of digital noise will reduce our ability to recognize images on television.

Method & Materials

You will select nine images of celebrities, add a noise filter to each image, and then ask volunteers to identify the images.
You will need nine images of celebrities, a Fotor app on your phone, and fourteen volunteers.

Results

The results of the experiment showed that the recognition of the images depended on the features of the celebrity's face. Some volunteers needed the "clean" image of a celebrity, while others did not need to go far in the decreasing of noise in order to identify them.

Why do this project?

This science project is interesting because it shows how digital noise can affect our ability to recognize images.

Also Consider

Experiment variations to consider include testing different types of images (e.g. animals, objects, etc.) and testing different levels of digital noise.

Full project details

Additional information and source material for this project are available below.
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