Posts tagged vision
What specific features should visual neurons encode, given the infinity of real-world images and the limited number of neurons available to represent them? We investigated neuronal selectivity in monkey inferotemporal cortex via the vast hypothesis space of a generative deep neural network, avoiding assumptions about features or semantic categories. A genetic algorithm searched this space for stimuli that maximized neuronal firing. This led to the evolution of rich synthetic images of objects with complex combinations of shapes, colors, and textures, sometimes resembling animals or familiar people, other times revealing novel patterns that did not map to any clear semantic category. These results expand our conception of the dictionary of features encoded in the cortex, and the approach can potentially reveal the internal representations of any system whose input can be captured by a generative model.
via https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092–8674(19)30391–5
While it’s certainly true that dystopian science fiction has become popular in the last few decades, it doesn’t follow that no one has been putting forward more optimistic pictures of tomorrow. Just because Stephenson and others embraced the dark images of cyberpunk, environmental doom, and whatnot doesn’t mean everyone did. From the 1980s to the early 2010s, the late author Iain Banks (who I have nominated for canonization) spun fantastic visions of a post-scarcity society he dubbed The Culture, which was full of artificially-intelligent robots and ships, giant space colonies, individuals who lived almost forever and regularly swapped genders, and seemingly endless, endless wonder. Similarly, Star Trek went off television from 2005 to 2017, but its vision of post-scarcity goodwill and polite liberalism — what a friend described as the Enlightenment-on-speed — continued all the while on the big screen.
via https://www.fastcompany.com/90247038/sorry-but-we-cant-fantasize-our-way-out-of-this-mess
We show that walls, and other obstructions with edges, can be exploited as naturally-occurring “cameras” that reveal the hidden scenes beyond them. In particular, we demonstrate methods for using the subtle spatio-temporal radiance variations that arise on the ground at the base of a wall’s edge to construct a one-dimensional video of the hidden scene behind the wall. The resulting technique can be used for a variety of applications in diverse physical settings. From standard RGB video recordings, we use edge cameras to recover 1-D videos that reveal the number and trajectories of people moving in an occluded scene. We further show that adjacent wall edges, such as those that arise in the case of an open doorway, yield a stereo camera from which the 2-D location of hidden, moving objects can be recovered. We demonstrate our technique in a number of indoor and outdoor environments involving varied floor surfaces and illumination conditions.
via http://people.csail.mit.edu/klbouman/cornercameras.html
screen size vs. viewing distance
Umpire Decision Review System (DRS), a suite of technologies which assist - or rather, overrule - the umpire adjudicating some of sports greatest unknowables, the LBW, and the snick. Of course, these technologies, intended to increase accuracy, only inflamed controversy as their own accuracy was questioned as much as the human umpires. LBW is, after all, an epistemological problem - the question of whether a ball which strikes the batsman would have struck the wicket were the batsman not there is a question for Plato, not for machines.
http://commentaryproject.org/articles/spectacular-sports-visualisations/
Enter the EyeWire project, an online game that recruits volunteers to map out those cellular contours within a mouse’s retina. The game was created and launched in December 2012 by a team led by H. Sebastian Seung, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Players navigate their way through the retina one 4.5-micrometer tissue block at a time, coloring the branches of neurons along the way. Most of the effort gets done in massive online competitions between players vying to map out the most volume. (Watch a video of a player walking through a tissue block here.) By last week, the 120,000 EyeWire players had completed 2.3 million blocks. That may sound like a lot, but it is less than 2% of the retina.
http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2014/05/computer-game-reveals-space-time-neurons-eye
In general, mammals don’t have the best color vision. In part, that’s because our ancestors developed trying to see in the dark, not out in the bright sunlight. “There was a time where to be a mammal was to be a small, nocturnal, rodent-like mammal,” said Duke’s Sonke Johnsen, author of the book, The Optics of Life. Both humans and whales retain the marks of that evolutionary path. “Our color vision is kind of a kluge,” Johnsen continued. “If you look at the color vision of birds and reptiles and fish. It’s very well put together, nicely optimized. You look at our trichromatic vision, it’s really kind of pieced together.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/youre-eye-to-eye-with-a-whale-in-the-ocean-what-does-it-see/274448/
