Robust Object Recognition with Cortex-like Mechanisms

Serre T., Wolf L., Bileschi S., Riesenhuber M., Poggio T.,

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI ) , Vol. 29, No. 3 Page(s): 411 - 426 , March, 2007

Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/TPAMI.2007.56

Abstract: We introduce a new general framework for the recognition of complex visual scenes, which is motivated by biology: We describe a hierarchical system that closely follows the organization of visual cortex and builds an increasingly complex and invariant feature representation by alternating between a template matching and a maximum pooling operation. We demonstrate the strength of the approach on a range of recognition tasks: From invariant single object recognition in clutter to multiclass categorization problems and complex scene understanding tasks that rely on the recognition of both shape-based as well as texture-based objects. Given the biological constraints that the system had to satisfy, the approach performs surprisingly well: It has the capability of learning from only a few training examples and competes with state-of-the-art systems. We also discuss the existence of a universal, redundant dictionary of features that could handle the recognition of most object categories. In addition to its relevance for computer vision, the success of this approach suggests a plausibility proof for a class of feedforward models of object recognition in cortex.

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