Object recognition for free
Object recognition — determining what objects are where in a digital image — is a central research topic in computer vision. But a person looking at an image will spontaneously make a higher-level judgment about the scene as whole: It’s a kitchen, or a campsite, or a conference room. Among computer science researchers, the problem known as “scene recognition” has received relatively little attention. Last December, at the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, MIT researchers announced the compilation of the world’s largest database of images labeled according to scene type, with 7 million entries. By exploiting a machine-learning technique known as “deep learning” — which is a revival of the classic artificial-intelligence technique of neural networks — they used it to train the most successful scene-classifier yet, which was between 25 and 33 percent more accurate than its best predecessor. At the International Conference on Learning Representations this weekend, the researchers...