Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Seeing the Forest For the Trees

Posted by kdawson on from the i-can-see-clearly-now dept.

swframe writes "A new object recognition system developed at MIT and UCLA looks for rudimentary visual features shared by multiple examples of the same object. Then it looks for combinations of those features shared by multiple examples, and combinations of those combinations, and so on, until it has assembled a model of the object that resembles a line drawing. Popular Science has a summary of the research. I've been working on something similar and I think this accomplishment looks very promising."

5 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. This is a realization of David Marr's early work. by bezenek · · Score: 4, Interesting

    David Marr proposed the idea of a primal sketch as the first stage of converting the two-dimensional image on the retina to a full understanding of what is being looked at. This work culminated in a paper published in 1980 called "Theory of edge detection."

    Marr was a faculty member at MIT, so it is appropriate for this work to have been done there.

    For more information, see:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Marr_(neuroscientist)

    and

    http://www.amazon.com/Vision-Computational-Investigation-Representation-Information/dp/0716715678

    -Todd

    --
    Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
  2. While you chaps theorise by Rogerborg · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Honda just gets on with implementing it. Oh, look, it's even got an automobile analogy: Asimo just did a drive-by on your research.

    --
    If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
  3. A system can't just "learn" - does it use a GA? by Viol8 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Even neural nets have to be programmed at some level to exhibit behaviour that the programmers think will allow them to learn the task at hand unless these guys used some sort of genetic algorithm. The article doesn't mention it. Does anyone know?

    Also it doesn't explain whether the system just recognises similar pictures to what its seen before - eg this picture looks like object type 123 (which to a human would be a horses rump) or whether it can combine all views of an object and recognise them all as that object , eg this picture looks like a horse. If its the latter how does it do it - does it have to be shown the object from a large number of angles or can it just infer from a couple of angles what the object would be like from many others?

  4. dogs etc by jrraines · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I certainly haven't worked in this area but for years have wondered how people including fairly young children recognize a dachshund, a bulldog and a great dane as dogs and other things as goats, cats, etc. Dogs are amazingly varied in shape and size and color. It seems like a VERY hard problem.

  5. Re:Cognitive science ahoy! by Raffaello · · Score: 2, Interesting

    No, because it doesn't.

    Upper paleolithic european cave art used continuous, flowing lines, created by spit-painting (think prehistoric mouth airbrush), not short, overlapping, straight lines. The system described in TFA produces results that resemble the sort of lame, pseudo-cubist drawing one saw in art schools in the mid 20th c.