Testing the equivalency of human "predators" and deep neural networks in the detection of cryptic moths.

Researchers have shown growing interest in using deep neural networks (DNNs) to efficiently test the effects of perceptual processes on the evolution of color patterns and morphologies. Whether this is a valid approach remains unclear, as it is unknown whether the relative detectability of ecologically relevant stimuli to DNNs actually matches that of biological neural networks. To test this, we compare image classification performance by humans and six DNNs (AlexNet, VGG-16, VGG-19, ResNet-18, SqueezeNet, and GoogLeNet) trained to detect artificial moths on tree trunks.