Improving visual search
MIT Technology Review takes a look at the current developments in the visual search arena and how new approaches to visual search involve analyzing brain patterns:
Neurophysiologists at the CBCL are studying how, exactly, the brain does its visual work. They note how each pixel in an image stimulates a photoreceptor in the eye, for instance, based on the pixel’s color value and brightness: each stimulus leads neurons to fire in a particular pattern. The programmers make a mathematical model of those patterns, tracking which neurons fire (and how strongly) and which don’t. They tell the computer to reproduce the right pattern when it sees a particular pixel, and then they train the system with positive and negative examples of objects. This is a tree, and this is not.