DeepDream

DeepDream is a computer vision program created by Google which uses a convolutional neural network to find and enhance patterns in images via algorithmic pareidolia, thus creating a dreamlike hallucinogenic appearance in the deliberately over-processed images.

The DeepDream software, initially codenamed “Inception” after the film of the same name, was developed for the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) in 2014 and released in July 2015. The software is designed to detect faces and other patterns in images, with the aim of automatically classifying images. When reiterations are run to tease out the found imagery even further, a form of pareidolia results by which psychedelic and surreal images are generated algorithmically. The oft-cited resemblance of the imagery to LSD- and psilocybin-induced hallucinations is suggestive of a functional resemblance between artificial neural networks and particular layers of the visual cortex, a matter which merits further study.

There are some mobile and web applications based on this software to transform photos.

See also

Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, Computer Vision

Material

• https://github.com/kesara/deepdreamer
• https://github.com/google/deepdream
• https://github.com/graphific/DeepDreamVideo

Papers

• Mordvintsev, Alexander, Christopher Olah, and Mike Tyka. Inceptionism: Going deeper into neural networks Google Research Blog. Retrieved June 20 (2015).