Seeing the forest for the trees
Object recognition is one of the core topics in computer vision research: After all, a computer that can see isn’t much use if it has no idea what it’s looking at. Researchers at MIT, working with colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, have developed new techniques that should make object recognition systems much easier to build and should enable them use computer memory more efficiently.A conventional object recognition system, when trying to discern a particular type of object in a digital image, will generally begin by looking for the object’s salient features. A system built to recognize faces, for instance, might look for things resembling eyes, noses and mouths and then determine whether they have the right spatial relationships with each other. The design of such systems, however, usually requires human intuition: A programmer decides which parts of the objects are the right ones to key in on....