Viewer-Centered Object Recognition in Monkeys

How does the brain recognize three-dimensional objects? We trained monkeys to recognize computer rendered objects presented from an arbitrarily chosen training view, and subsequently tested their ability to generalize recognition for other views. Our results provide additional evidence in favor of with a recognition model that accomplishes view-invariant performance by storing a limited number of object views or templates together with the capacity to interpolate between the templates (Poggio and Edelman, 1990).

The Role of Fixation and Visual Attention in Object Recognition

This research project is a study of the role of fixation and visual attention in object recognition. In this project, we build an active vision system which can recognize a target object in a cluttered scene efficiently and reliably. Our system integrates visual cues like color and stereo to perform figure/ground separation, yielding candidate regions on which to focus attention. Within each image region, we use stereo to extract features that lie within a narrow disparity range about the fixation position. These selected features are then used as input to an alignment-style recognition system. We show that visual attention and fixation significantly reduce the complexity and the false identifications in model-based recognition using Alignment methods. We also demonstrate that stereo can be used effectively as a figure/ground separator without the need for accurate camera calibration.