Neural networks and neuroscience-inspired computer vision.

Brains are, at a fundamental level, biological computing machines. They transform a torrent of complex and ambiguous sensory information into coherent thought and action, allowing an organism to perceive and model its environment, synthesize and make decisions from disparate streams of information, and adapt to a changing environment. Against this backdrop, it is perhaps not surprising that computer science, the science of building artificial computational systems, has long looked to biology for inspiration.

Do we understand high-level vision?

'High-level' vision lacks a single, agreed upon definition, but it might usefully be defined as those stages of visual processing that transition from analyzing local image structure to analyzing structure of the external world that produced those images. Much work in the last several decades has focused on object recognition as a framing problem for the study of high-level visual cortex, and much progress has been made in this direction. This approach presumes that the operational goal of the visual system is to read-out the identity of an object (or objects) in a scene, in spite of variation in the position, size, lighting and the presence of other nearby objects.