Cambridge, MA -- At last, neuroscience is having an impact on computer science and artificial intelligence (AI). For the first time, scientists in Tomaso Poggio’s laboratory at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT applied a computational model of how the brain processes visual information to a complex, real world task: recognizing the objects in a busy street scene. The researchers were pleasantly surprised at the power of this new approach.

Compared to traditional computer-vision systems, the biological model was surprisingly versatile. Traditional systems are engineered for specific object classes. For instance, systems engineered to detect faces or recognize textures are poor at detecting cars. In the biological model, the same algorithm can learn to detect widely different types of objects.

This research work has been published by the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence under the name "Robust Object Recognition with Cortex-Like Mechanisms" (Volume 29, Number 3, Pages 411-426, March 2007). Here are two links to the abstract and to the full paper (PDF format, 31 pages, 3.48 MB), from which the above images have been extracted.

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