[Tyler]

Honeybees Beat Computers at Face Recognition
     


Robots.net reader Jan let us know about some interesting new
research from Dr.
Adrian Dyer at Monash University. It turns out honey bees can learn
to recognize human faces from different angles. Not impressed yet? The
bees are doing it with brains that are 0.01 percent the size of a human
brain. Their entire brain only has about one million neurons. Yet the
bees are doing a better job than the most advanced machine vision
systems. This means bee brains are doing things much more
efficiently than machine vision researchers believed possible. The
researchers have already learned one bee brain secret - the bees do
image interpolation on multiple rotated views of
the face, allowing them to recognize the same face at a novel rotational
angle. After researchers get over their surprise that bees are mentally
rotating images in their tiny brains, they'll get right on the job of
improving machine vision, making for better, faster, and cheaper robots.
For more technical details see the paper Insect
Brains Use Image Interpolation Mechanism to Recognise Rotated
Objects (PDF format). Honey bee photo by flickr user
cygnus921.

   

http://robots.net/article/2745.html