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                  B O S T O N   U N I V E R S I T Y


                    Department of Computer Science

                                 and

              Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems


                         C O L L O Q U I U M

                       Wednesday, June 4, 1997

                               2:00 pm

                      (Coffee served at 1:45 pm)

                        111 Cummington Street
                             Room MCS 135

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      OBJECT RECOGNITION: MORE THAN REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST?

                            Shimon Edelman
                        The Weizmann Institute
             http://eris.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~edelman/

To recognize a previously seen object, the visual system must overcome
the variability in   the object's appearance  caused by  illumination,
pose, and, for articulated or flexible  objects, by the effects of the
additional degrees of freedom  peculiar to such objects.  Developments
in  computer  vision  suggest  that  it may   be  possible  to achieve
recognition invariant to these   factors, by learning  to  interpolate
between stored views of the  target object, taken under representative
combinations of viewing conditions.   One may observe,  however,  that
daily life  situations typically  require categorization, rather  than
recognition, of objects.   Due to the   open-ended  character both  of
natural kinds and of  artifical categories, categorization cannot rely
on  interpolation  between stored  examples. Nonetheless, knowledge of
several  representative members,  or   prototypes,   of each   of  the
categories of interest  can still provide the necessary  computational
substrate  for  the categorization  of  new instances.   The resulting
representational scheme based on similarities to prototypes is readily
mapped  onto the  mechanisms of  biological vision  revealed by recent
psychophysical  and   physiological   studies, and   has    intriguing
implications for the understanding of  the general issue of  cognitive
representation,  and,  in  particular,   of    the manner  in    which
representation can conform, or be faithful, to its object.

Hosts: Paolo Gaudiano and Stan Sclaroff

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    For directions, see http://www.cs.bu.edu/misc/Directions.html
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