Authors: Zhaohui Zhu, Marc A. Kastner, Shin'ichi Satoh

Abstract:

The pareidolia phenomenon is a discriminating characteristic of psychiatric disorders, expressed through visual illusions seen by patients. Typically, it can be diagnosed through the noise pareidolia test, which is time-consuming to both patients and experts. In this research, we propose a novel computer-assisted method to identify pareidolia phenomenon. The idea is to emulate patient behavior in face detection models to get a similar behavior in noise pareidolia tests as patients. Unlike most medical image analysis methods, for psychiatric disorders the ground-truth varies from patient to patient, making this challenging. For a set of training patients, we fine-tune reference models to detect noise pareidolia test responses in the same way as each individual patient. Then, a new test patient is identified by comparing their behavior to the reference models using a distance function in a trained embedding space. In the experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated. Further, we can show that our method can improve the efficiency of the clinical noise pareidolia test by reducing the number of necessary test images while reaching a comparable high accuracy.

Type: MultiMedia Modelling (MMM) 2022

Publication date: April 2022

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-98358-1_24