Albert Einstein / Marylin Monroe Hybrid May Help Robots See Like Humans
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Friday, 1 of May , 2009 at 7:23 am
See this picture of Albert Einstein? Leave it up on your monitor and walk away. When you get far enough, it’ll change into a picture of Marilyn Monroe (click here for a video of this happening if you’re too lazy to get up). The trick to this is that there are two pictures there: one of Einstein in a high spatial frequency, and one of Marilyn in a low spatial frequency. Our brains tend to focus on high frequencies close up and low frequencies further away, which is why this picture morphs back and forth as your perceived distance from it changes… And the cool bit is that you can tell just about exactly when your brain switches from high frequency perception to low frequency perception.
So how is this related to robots? Well, robot vision is a messy business. Humans have the ability to look at a scene and intuitively separate relevant information from irrelevant information. Like, when you enter an unfamiliar room, you sort of get an overall impression of it, and then you can focus on specific details. Robots, on the other hand, generally have to look at all the details when confronted with an unfamiliar scene and then decide whether each one is relevant or not. Understanding how our brain makes the transition between high and low frequency information and how we’re able to visually interpret a scene may help us figure out how to make robots with more human (i.e. more efficient) vision systems.
More hybrid images can be found at MIT professor Aude Oliva’s website here.
[ MIT Museum ] VIA [ Wired ]
Comments (2)
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Comment by Anastasios-Antonios Toulkeridis
Made Saturday, 2 of May , 2009 at 4:42 am
ok, now i’m seriously worried, there IS something wrong with my vision. No matter how far away from the picture i went i kept seeing albert. Or was it Marilyn with mustache?
Comment by Shmuel
Made Wednesday, 6 of May , 2009 at 4:36 am
No, nothing wrong with your vision I cant see it either.