Cortex-like Mechanisms

Poggio lab mimics how the brain recognizes street scenes. “We chose street scene recognition as an example because it has a restricted set of object categories, and it has practical social applications.” At last, neuroscience is now having an impact on computer science and artificial intelligence.


From the March 2007 edition of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence:

'We introduce a new general framework for the recognition of complex visual scenes, which is motivated by biology. We describe a hierarchical system that closely follows the organization of visual cortex and builds an increasingly complex and invariant feature representation by alternating between a template matching and a maximum pooling operation. We demonstrate the strength of the approach on a range of recognition tasks. From invariant single object recognition in clutter to multiclass categorization problems and complex scene understanding tasks that rely on the recognition of both shape-based as well as texture-based objects. Given the biological constraints that the system had to satisfy, the approach performs surprisingly well: It has the capability of learning from only a few training examples and competes with state-of-the-art systems. We also discuss the existence of a universal, redundant dictionary of features that could handle the recognition of most object categories. In addition to its relevance for computer vision, the success of this approach suggests a plausibility proof for a class of feedforward models of object recognition in cortex.'