Seeing things

If computers could recognize objects, they could automatically search through hours of video footage for a particular two-minute scene. A tourist strolling down a street in a strange city could take a cell-phone photo of an unmarked monument and immediately find out what it was. And an Internet image search on, say, "Shakespeare" would pull up pictures of Shakespeare, not pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow in the movie Shakespeare in Love. Though object recognition is one of the major research topics in computer vision, MIT researchers may have found a way to make it much more practical. Typically, object recognition algorithms need to be "trained" using digital images in which objects have been outlined and labeled by hand. By looking at a million pictures of cars labeled "car," an algorithm can learn to recognize features shared by images of cars. The problem is that for every new class of objects...

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