A feedforward architecture accounts for rapid categorization

Primates are remarkably good at recognizing objects. The level of performance of their visual system and its robustness to image degradations still surpasses the best computer vision systems despite decades of engineering effort. In particular, the high accuracy of primates in ultra rapid object categorization and rapid serial visual presentation tasks is remarkable. Given the number of processing stages involved and typical neural latencies, such rapid visual processing is likely to be mostly feedforward. Here we show that a specific implementation of a class of feedforward theories of object recognition (that extend the Hubel and Wiesel simple-to-complex cell hierarchy and account for many anatomical and…

• NS
  National Science Foundation

  Award: 0546262
• EM
  Eugene McDermott Foundation
• TM
  Toyota Motor Corporation
• NI
  National Institutes of Health
• AR
  Advanced Research Projects Agency