Visual Recognition in Primates and Machines

Understanding the processing of information in our cortex is a significant part of understanding how the brain works and of understanding intelligence itself, arguably one of the greatest problems in science today. In particular, our visual abilities are computationally amazing and we are still far from imitating them with computers. Thus, visual cortex may well be a good proxy for the rest of the cortex and indeed for intelligence itself. But despite enormous progress in the physiology and anatomy of the visual cortex, our understanding of the underlying computations remains fragmentary.

I will briefly review the anatomy and the physiology of primate visual cortex and then describe a class of quantitative models of the ventral stream for object recognition, which, heavily constrained by physiology and biophysics, have been developed during the last two decades and which have been recently shown to be quite successful in explaining several physiological data across different visual areas. I will discuss their performance and architecture from the point of view of state-of-the-art computer vision system. Surprisingly, such models also mimic the level of human performance in difficult rapid image categorization tasks in which human vision is forced to operate in a feedforward mode.

I will then focus on the key limitations of such hierarchical feedforward models for object recognition, discuss why they are incomplete models of vision and suggest possible alternatives focusing on the computational role of attention and its likely substrate – cortical backprojections. Finally, I will outline a program of research to attack the broad challenge of understanding in terms of brain circuits the process of image inference and in particular recognition tasks beyond simple scene classification.