Object recognition by hierarchically organized anarchy
Bio
Bosco Tjan received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of
Minnesota under the supervisions of Gordon Legge and Dan Kersten of
Psychology. He subsequently worked with Heinrich Buelthoff at the
Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tuebingen, Germany, and
then with John Oliensis at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New
Jersey. He joined the psychology faculty at the University of Southern
California in January of 2001. His research interest includes various
aspects of visual processing pertained to object recognition, scene
percpetion, and reading.
Abstract
Ideally, the best representation for an object-recognition task should
depend on the task and the object set. Since the complexity of the decision
space varies greatly between tasks and object sets, one would expect
multiple representations be used by the visual system for the purpose of
object recognition. Most conventional theories of object recognition assume
that within a single visual-processing pathway only one form of
representation is derived and used to recognize objects. Versatility of the
visual system comes from having multiple visual-processing pathways, each
supporting a particular class of objects or recognition tasks.
We propose
and simulate a simpler and theoretically more constrainted alternative,
capable of explaining the same set of data and more. A single primary
visual-processing pathway, loosely modular, is assumed. Memory modules are
attached to decision sites along this pathway. Object-identity decision is
made independently at each site. A site's response time is a
monotonic-decreasing function of its confidence regarding its decision. The
system's response is the first-arriving response from any site. The
effective representation of such a system, if determined behaviorally, can
appear to be self-adapting and specialized for different tasks and stimuli
(resembling a number of recent neuro-cognitive findings). This, however, is
merely a reflection of the decisions being made at the appropriate level of
abstraction.