Hybrid images
Aude Oliva∗
MIT-BCS

Antonio Torralba†
MIT-CSAIL

Philippe. G. Schyns‡
University of Glasgow

Figure 1: A hybrid image is a picture that combines the low-spatial frequencies of one picture with the high spatial frequencies of anotherpicture producing an image with an interpretation that changes with viewing distance. In this figure, the people may appear sad, up close, but
step back a few meters and look at the expressions again.

Abstract
We present hybrid images, a technique that produces static images
with two interpretations, which change as a function of viewing
distance. Hybrid images are based on the multiscale processing ofimages by the human visual system and are motivated by masking
studies in visual perception. These images can be used to createcompelling displays in which the image appears to change as theviewing distance changes. We show that by taking into accountperceptual grouping mechanisms it is possible to build compellinghybrid images with stable percepts at each distance. We show examples in which hybrid images are used to create textures that become visible only when seen up-close, to generate facial expressions whose interpretation changes with viewing distance, and tovisualize changes over time within a single picture.
Keywords: Hybrid images, human perception, scale space

1

Introduction

Here we exploit the multiscale perceptual mechanisms of human vision to create visual illusions (hybrid images) where two different
interpretations of a picture can be perceived by changing the viewing distance or the presentation time. We use and extend the method
originally proposed by Schyns and Oliva [1994; 1997; 1999]. Fig. 1
shows an example of a hybrid image assembled from two images∗ e-mail: oliva@mit.edu† e-mail:torralba@csail.mit.edu‡ e-mail: p.schyns@psy.gla.ac.uk

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in which the faces displayed different emotions. High spatial frequencies correspond to faces with ”sad” expressions. Low spatial
frequencies correspond to the same faces with ”happy” and ”surprise” emotions (i.e., the emotions are, from left to right: happy,
surprise, happy and happy). To switch from one interpretation tothe other one can step away a few meters from the picture.
Artists have effectively employed low spatial frequency manipulation to elicit a percept that changes when relying on peripheral
vision (e.g., [Livingstone 2000; Dali 1996]). Inspired by this work,
Setlur and Gooch [2004] propose a technique that creates facial images with conflicting emotional states at different spatial frequencies. The images produce subtle expression variations with gazechanges. In this paper, we demonstrate the effectiveness of hybrid
images in creating images with two very different possible interpretations.
Hybrid images are generated by superimposing two images at two
different spatial scales: the low-spatial scale is obtained by filtering
one image with a low-pass filter; the high spatial scale is obtainedby filtering a second image with a high-pass filter. The final image is composed by adding these two filtered images. Note thathybrid images are a different technique than picture mosaics [Silvers 1997]. Picture mosaics have two interpretations: a local one(which is given by the content of each of the pictures that compose
the mosaic) and a global one (which is best seen at some predefined
distance). Hybrid images, however, contain two coherent global
image interpretations, one of which is of the low spatial frequencies, the other of high spatial frequencies.
We illustrate this technique with several proof-of-concept examples. We show how this technique can be applied to create facepictures that change expression with viewing distance, to display
two configurations of a scene in a single picture, and to present textures that disappear when viewed at a distance.

2

The design of hybrid images

A hybrid image (H) is obtained by combining two images (I1 andI2 ), one filtered with a low-pass filter (G1 ) and the second one fil-

gain

1

0
16
frequency (c/i)

+

gain

1

0
24
frequency (c/i)

Figure 2: hybrid images are generated by superimposing two images at two different spatial scales: the low-spatial scale is obtained byfiltering one image with a low-pass filter, and the high spatial scale is obtained by filtering a second image with a high-pass filter. The final
hybrid image is composed by adding these two filtered images.

tered with a high-pass filter (1 − G2 ): H = I1 · G1 + I2 · (1 − G2 ),the operations are defined in the Fourier domain. Hybrid images
are defined by two parameters: the frequency cut of the low resolution image (the one to be seen at a far distance), and the frequency
cut of the high resolution image (the one to be seen up close). An
additional parameter can be added by introducing a different gain
for each frequency channel. For the hybrids shown in this paper wehave set the gain to 1 for both spatial channels. We use gaussian
filters (G1 and G2 ) for the low-pass and the high-pass filters. We
define the cut-off frequency of each filter as the frequency for withthe amplitude gain of the filter is 1/2.
Figure 2 illustrates the process used to create one hybrid image.
The distance at which each component of a hybrid image is best
seen and the distance at which the hybrid percept alternates canbe fully determined as a function of the image size and the cutoff frequencies of the filters (expressed in cycles/image1 ). Whenviewing the images in this paper, switch between interpretations bystepping a few meters away from the picture. Note that the larger
you display the images, the farther you will have to go in order to
see the alternative image interpretation.

2.1

The perception of hybrid images

In the following section we describe the motivation behind hybrid
images, as they relate to studies in human perception. We will provide the framework for understanding the mechanisms involved inperception of double image percepts.
Visual psychophysics research has shown that human observers areable to comprehend the meaning of a novel image within a shortglance (100 msec [Potter 1975]). This phenomenal performanceof rapid image understanding can be experienced while watching
fast scene edits in an action movie or in a music video. Researchin human perception has suggested that image understanding efficiency is based on a multi-scale, global to local analysis of thevisual input [Burt and Adelson 1983; Majaj et al. 2002]: an initial
1 We use the units cycle/image for spatial frequencies as they are independent of the image resolution. The output of a gaussian filter with a cutoff
frequency of 16 cycles/image will be the same independently of the resolution of the original image. The units cycle/degree of visual angle are used
to describe the resolution observed when the image has a fixed size and isseen from a fixed distance.

528

analysis of the global structure and the spatial relationships between
components guides the analysis of local details [Schyns and Oliva
1994; Watt 1987]. The global precedence hypothesis of image analysis (“seeing the forest before the trees”, [Navon 1977]) implies acoarse-to-fine frequency analysis of an image, where the low spatial
frequency components, which are contrasted and carried by the fastmagnocellular pathway, dominate early visual processing [Hughes
et al. 1996; Lindeberg 1993; Parker et al. 1992; Schyns and Oliva
1994; Sugase et al. 1999].
Using hybrid stimuli, Schyns and Oliva [1994] tested the role thatspatial frequency bands play for the interpretation of natural images. When the task required identifying a scene image quickly,
human observers interpreted the low spatial frequency band (at afrequency cutoff of 8 cycles/image) before the high spatial frequency band (from 24 cycles/image): when showed hybrid images for 30 ms only, observers identified the low spatial scale (e.g.,they would answer “cheetah” when presented with the image from
Fig. 3) whereas for 150 ms duration, they identified the high spatial
scale first (e.g., tiger in Fig. 3). Interestingly, participants were unaware that the visual stimuli had two interpretations. Additional experiments suggested that the spatial frequency band preferentiallyselected for interpreting an image depends on the task the viewer
must solve. Using hybrid faces similar to the one in Fig. 5.b, Schyns
and Oliva [1999] showed that when participants were asked to determine the emotion of an hybrid face image displayed for only
50 ms (happy, angry or neutral), they selected the low spatial frequency face (angry in Fig. 5.b), but when they had to determine
the gender of the same image, they used the low spatial frequency
components of the hybrid as often as the high. Again, participants
did not report noticing presence of two emotions or two genders inthese images. These results demonstrated that the selection of frequency bands for fast image recognition is a flexible mechanism:
The image analysis might still unfold according to a low to highspatial scale processing, but human observers are able to quickly
select the frequency band, low or high, that conveyed the most information to solve a given task and interpret the image. Importantly,
when selecting a spatial frequency, observers were not conscious of
the information in the other spatial scale.
In the study of human perception, hybrid images allow characterizing the role of different frequency channels for image recognition,and evaluate the time course of spatial frequency processing. Hybrid images provide a new paradigm in which images interpretation
can be modulated by playing with viewing distance or presenta-

a)

b)

c)

Figure 3: Perceptual grouping between edges and blobs. The three images are perceived as a tiger when seen up-close and as a cheetah fromfar away. The differences among the three images is the degrees of alignment between the edges and blobs. Image a) contains two images
superimposed without alignment. In image b), the eyes are aligned. And in image c), the head pose and the locations of eyes and mouth arealigned. Under proper alignment, the residual frequency band does not manage to build a percept. When seen up-close, it is difficult to see
the cheetah’s face, which is perfectly masked by the tiger’s face. From far away, the tiger’s edges are assimilated to the cheetah’s face.

Hybrid images, when one percept dominates, consciously switching to the alternative interpretation becomes almost impossible.
Only when the viewing distance changes can we switch to the alternative interpretation. In a hybrid image it is important that thealternative image is perceived as noise (lacking internal organization) or that it blends with the dominant subband.
Rules of perceptual grouping modulate the effectiveness of hybrid
images. Low spatial frequencies (blobs) lack a precise definition of
object shapes and region boundaries, which require the visual system to group the blobs together to form a meaningful interpretationof the coarse scale. When observers are presented with ambiguous
forms they interpret the elements in the simplest way. Observers
prefer an arrangement having fewer rather than more elements, having a symmetrical rather than an asymmetrical composition andgenerally respecting other Gestalt rules of perception.

Figure 4: Color at high spatial frequencies is used to enhance thebicycle up-close. From a distance, one sees a motorcycle. The
shape of the motorcycle is interpreted as shadows up-close.

tion time. For a given distance of viewing, or a given temporalfrequency a particular band of spatial frequency dominates visual
processing. Visual analysis of the hybrid image still unfolds fromglobal to local perception, but within the selected frequency band,for a given viewing distance, the observer will perceive the global
structure of the hybrid first (that the image in Fig. 3 represents ahead), and take an additional hundred milliseconds to organize thelocal information into a coherent percept (organization of blobs if
the image is viewed at a far distance, or organization of edges for
close viewing).

2.2

Rules of perceptual grouping and hybrid images

In theory, one can combine any two images to create a hybrid picture. In practice, aesthetically pleasing hybrid images require following some rules that we describe in this section. In successful

529

Symmetry and repetitiveness of a pattern in the low spatial frequencies are bad: they form a strong percept that it is difficult toeliminate perceptually. If the image in the high spatial frequencies
lacks the same strong grouping cues, the image interpretation corresponding to the low spatial frequencies will always be available,
even when viewing from a short distance. By introducing accidentalalignments it is possible to reduce the influence of one spatial channel over the other. For instance, in Fig. 2 the top of the elephant(low spatial frequencies) is aligned with the horizon line (both low
and high spatial frequencies). Therefore, when seeing the image
up close, the top edge of the elephant can be explained by some of
the fine edges. This reduces the saliency of the elephant. Fig. 3
shows several examples of hybrid images with different degrees ofagreement between the low and high spatial frequencies.
Color provides a very strong grouping cue that can be used to create
more compelling illusions. For instance, in Fig. 4 color is used
only in the high spatial frequencies to enhance the bicycle and to
reinforce the interpretation of the motorcycle as shadows when theimage is viewed up close.
The importance of correctly choosing the cut-off frequencies for thefilters is illustrated in Fig. 5. In Fig. 5.a, both filters have a strong
overlap, and consequently, there is not a clean transition between
the two faces. For the hybrid image on Fig. 5.b, the two filters
have little overlap. The result is a cleaner image that produces an

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Figure 5: An angry man or a thoughtful woman? Both hybrid images are produced by combining the faces of an angry man (lowspatial frequencies) and a stern woman (high spatial frequencies).
You can switch the percept by watching the picture from a few meters. a) Bad hybrid image. The image looks ambiguous from up
close due to the filter overlap. b) Good Hybrid image.

unambiguous interpretation (it looks like a woman from up close
and as a man from far away). This is especially important when theimages are not perfectly aligned.
One interesting observation is that when the images are properly
constructed, the observer seems to perceive the masked image anoise. Hybrid images break one important statistical property ofreal-world natural images (Fig. 6), i.e., the correlations between
outputs of pass-band filters at consecutive spatial scales. Fig. 6.ashows the cross-correlation matrix obtained between the different
levels of a Laplacian pyramid for a natural image. The edges foundat one scale are correlated with the edges found in the scales below and above. The same thing is obtained when two images aresuperimposed (additive transparency). In this case there is not a
simple filter to separate both images (and the percept of the two
images is mixed independently of the distance at which we observe
the image). Fig. 6.c shows the correlation matrix obtained when an
image is blurred (with a cutoff frequency of 16c/i) and then corrupted with additive white noise. The correlation matrix reveals
which scales are dominated by the noise, as they do not have thecross-scale correlations we’d expect from a natural image. In thecase of a hybrid image, the correlation matrix (Fig. 6.d) reveals theexistence of two groups.
Fig. 7 shows the output of a Laplacian pyramid applied to the hybrid
image from Fig. 5.b. Low frequency channels and high frequency
channels see different images. Note that each subband is also an
hybrid image itself. If you move away from the page, you will see
that, one by one, the subbands take the identity of the low-scales.
At reading distance, the four images on the top row are interpreted
as an angry man; the bottom, a stern woman. As you step back fromthe images, you will see that the angry man’s face begins to appear
in more subbands. The finer the scale of each subband, the farther
you have to go in order to see the switch of images.
In summary, two primary mechanisms can be exploited to createcompelling hybrid images. The first is maximizing the correlation

530d) Hybrid: I1 G1 + I2 (1-G2)
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Figure 6: Correlations across levels of a Laplacian pyramid for images following several manipulations. a) Natural image, b) two images added, c) blurry image with additive white noise, and d) hybrid
image ( f1 = 16 cycles/image, f2 = 48 cycles/image).
between edges in the two scales so that they blend. The second
resides in the fact that the remaining edges that do not correlatewith other edges across scales can be perceived as noise. This is
the case in Fig. 5.b, for which there is a very compelling blendingof edges across scales, but, when viewing the image up close, there
seems to be some low-spatial frequency noise.

2.3

Capacity of scale space

Up to now, hybrid images have been obtained by mixing two images, but could it be possible to combine more than two images andstill have a coherent percept that transitions as we change viewing
distance? In a study about text masking, Majaj et al. [2002] created a stimulus superimposing 4 letters, each containing energy at
different spatial scales. As the observer moves away from the stimuli, they report the image switching from one letter to another. The
results are interesting, but the lack of good grouping cues between
the multiple scales creates an image that looks distorted. Also, multiple letters are visible at any given time. Superposition of multiple
images remains an open issue.

3

Applications

In this section we discuss some applications (see video complementing the paper for additional examples).
Private font: We can use the hybrid images to display textthat is not visible for people standing at some distance from theFigure 7: Output of a Laplacian pyramid revealing the components of the hybrid image of Fig. 5.b.

readable from a distance below one meter. From a distance of about
two meters, the text is unreadable. Masking of the low spatial frequencies is very important in producing this effect (Fig. 8). The
text in the bottom has only been high-pass filtered, and there is no
masking at low spatial frequencies, therefore it remains easy to readat relatively long distances.
Hybrid textures: We can create textures that disappear with viewing distance. An example of this idea is shown in Fig. 9. This figure shows an example of a woman’s face that turns into a cat whenlooking close. Note that this effect can not be obtained by superimposing the woman’s face and the cat’s face using transparency.
Using transparency (additive superposition) creates a face that will
not change with distance.

Figure 8: The hybrid font becomes invisible at few meters. The
bottom text remains easy to read at relatively long distances.

screen. Commercial products for user privacy generally rely onhead mounted displays or on polarized screens for which visibility
decreases with viewing angle. Hybrid fonts comprises two components: the high spatial frequencies (which will contain the text) andthe low spatial frequencies (which will contain the masking image).
For the high pass filter we use a gaussian filter with a width (σ )adjusted so that σ < n p , where n p is the thickness of a letter’s
stroke measured in pixels. The low-frequency channel (masking
signal) contains a text-like texture [Portilla and Simoncelli 2000].
Solomon and Pelli [1994] have shown that letters are more effectively masked by a noise in the frequency band of 3 cycles per letter.
Therefore we adjust the cut-off frequency of the low-pass filter tobe 3 ∗ n with n being the number of letters in a text line. The goal isto reduce the interference of the noise with the text when we viewing up close, while having an effective masking noise when looking
from further away. In the example shown in Fig. 8 the text is only

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Changing faces: Hybrid images are especially powerful to create
images of faces that change expressions, identity, or pose as wevary the viewing distance. Fig. 1 shows a compelling example ofchanges of facial expression. The edges at multiple scales blend
producing images that look natural at all distances. In the case offace images, correct alignment between facial features is importantin order to create pictures that seem unaltered. In case of misalignment, the best is to apply a distortion (affine warping) to the facethat will be in the low spatial frequencies.
Time changes: Fig. 9 shows an example of using an hybrid image
to show two states of a house by combining two picture taken at
two different instants.

4

Conclusion

We have described the technique, hybrid images, which permits
creating images with two interpretations that change as a functionof viewing distance. Despite the simplicity of the technique, the images produce very compelling surprise effects on naive observers.
They also provide an interesting new visualization tool to morph
two complementary images into one. Creating compelling hybrid
images is an open and challenging problem, as it relies on perceptual grouping mechanisms that interact across different spatial
scales.

Figure 9: right) Cat woman: the texture corresponding to the cat’s face disappears when the image is viewed from a few meters. Left) The
house under construction. When you view the image at a short distance, the house is seen under construction, but if you step away from thepicture you will see its final state.

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