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SUMMARY:Reverse Engineering the Human Visual System with Networks of Spiki
 ng Neurons - Simon Thorpe\, Brain and Cognition Research Centre\, Toulouse
  France
DTSTART:20070313T150000Z
DTEND:20070313T160000Z
UID:TALK6835@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Oliver Williams
DESCRIPTION:Can we use information about the way in which biological visua
 l systems function to reverse engineer the brain? As long ago as 1989\, I 
 had argued that the speed of processing achieved by the primate visual sys
 tem can be used to constrain processing algorithms and architectures. Rece
 ntly\, we have found evidence that the human visual system can detect the 
 presence of important visual patterns such as faces and animals in clutter
 ed visual environments in under 100 ms. Such data implies that a lot can b
 e done with just a single feed-forward pass through a series of hierarchic
 ally organised processing stages. This conjecture seems to be confirmed by
  results from  a number of recent artificial vision systems that achieve i
 mpressive levels of performance in scene categorisation tasks using very s
 imilar strategies\, and this leads to optimism that we could  be heading f
 or the long-awaited convergence between biological and machine vision.  Bu
 t there is another feature of biological vision that is absent from nearly
  all machine vision systems - biological vision does processing with spiki
 ng neurons. I will argue that by using the wave of spikes that is initiate
 d by the presentation of a visual stimulus\, and specifically the fact tha
 t the most strongly activated neurons tend to fire first\, the visual syst
 em can achieve processing speeds that would be difficult if not impossible
  to achieve using more conventional techniques. Such ideas can be used to 
 develop powerful image processing methods that can be even more efficient 
 that human vision.\n\n
LOCATION:Small public lecture room\, Microsoft Research Ltd\, 7 J J Thomso
 n Avenue (Off Madingley Road)\, Cambridge
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