The Pope is Emperor Palpatine

John Thickstun

By combining the high frequencies of one of the above images, and the low frequencies of the other, we can create a "hybrid image." When viewing the hybrid image at a close distance, the high frequencies dominate our perception and we perceive one image. Viewed from further away, we can no longer distinguish the high frequencies and the low frequencies dominate.

To merge the images, we first construct chains of images from each of the two source images with progressively greater gaussian blur. The blur can be interpreted as a low-pass filter, so each successive image in the chain has fewer high frequencies than the last. We then subtract subsequent images in the chain to form a series of laplacians. Returning to the idea of filters, these laplacians can be interpreted as band-pass filters of the source image; that is, each laplacian encodes a range of frequencies in the original image.

We can reconstruct one of the source images by reversing this process: add the laplacian chain together, along with the lowest frequency gaussian. To form a hybrid image, we modify this image reconstruction process. We add the lowest frequency gaussian of one image, along with its low frequency laplacians to the high frequency laplacians of the other images.

The result is that we see one image (defined by the high frequencies) when viewing the hybrid from nearby, and another (defined by the low frequencies) when viewing at a distance.

Behold, the Pope is Emperor Palpatine:

Another great secret revealed. Mitt Romney and Rick Perry are one and the same:

And from a distance, Obama looks a bit like Bush: