Context is ev … well, something, anyway

Friday, March 5, 2010 - 04:14 in Mathematics & Economics

Today, computers can’t reliably identify the objects in digital images. But if they could, they could comb through hours of video for the two or three minutes that a viewer might be interested in, or perform web searches where the search term was an image, not a sequence of words. And of course, object recognition is a prerequisite for the kind of home assistance robot that could execute an order like “Bring me the stapler.” Now, MIT researchers have found a way to improve object recognition systems by using information about context. If the MIT system thinks it’s identified a chair, for instance, it becomes more confident that the rectangular thing nearby is a table.A typical object recognition system will scan a digital image for groups of pixels that differ from those around them; those pixels could define an edge, a corner or some other feature of an object. Usually,...

Read the whole article on MIT Research

More from MIT Research

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net