Imagine you have thousands of photographs and only minutes to find a handful that contain Dalmation puppies. Or that you’re an intelligence analyst and you need to scan 5 million satellite pictures and pull out all the images with a helipad. Researchers proposed a solution to such information overload that could revolutionize how vast amounts of visual information are processed—allowing users to riffle through potentially millions of images and home in on what they are looking for in record time. This is called a cortically coupled computer vision (C3Vision) system, and it uses a computer to amplify the power of the quickest and most accurate tool for object recognition ever created: the human brain. The human brain has the capacity to process very complicated scenes and pick out relevant material before we’re even consciously aware we’re doing so. These ‘aha’ moments of recognition generate an electrical signal that can be picked up using electroencephalography (EEG), the recording of electrical activity along the scalp caused by the firing of neurons in the brain.
Researchers designed a device that monitors brain activity as a subject rapidly views a small sample of photographs culled from a much larger database—as many as 10 pictures a second. The device transmits the data to a computer that ranks which photographs elicited the strongest cortical recognition responses. The computer looks for similarities in the visual characteristics of different high-ranking photographs, such as color, texture and the shapes of edges and lines. Then it scans the much larger database—it could contain upward of 50 million images—and pulls out those that rank high in visual characteristics most highly correlated with the ‘aha’ moments detected by the EEG. It’s an idea that has already drawn significant interest from the U.S. government. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which pioneered such breakthrough technologies as computer networking, provided $2.4 million to test the device over the next 18 months. Analysts at the National Geospacial-Intelligence Agency will attempt to use the device to look for objects of interest within vast satellite images.
More information:
http://news.columbia.edu/record/2188#
More information:
http://news.columbia.edu/record/2188#