******* Language, Cognition, and Computation Lecture Series *******

Title                            The Visual Active Memory Perspective on Integrated Recognition Systems

Speaker                      Professor Gerhard Sagerer

Affiliation                   Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld

Date                            Thursday, February 19, 2004

Time                           1:00pm

Location                     Bartos Theater, E15-070

Abstract

Object recognition is the ability of a system to relate visual stimuli to its knowledge of

the world. Although humans perform this task effortlessly without thinking about it, a general

solution of this task has been proven to be very hard to find. In the last years, a new

paradigm has emerged that identifies a number of shortcomings in previous approaches

and proposes a more general object recognition approach. The Cognitive vision paradigm

is concerned with vision systems that evaluate, gather and integrate contextual knowledge

for visual analysis. It is an active process that generates knowledge on the basis of perception,

reasoning, learning and prior models. In the talk we will exemplify the cognitive

vision paradigm by means of an existing demonstrator system that follows the design principles

of an Visual Active Memory (VAM). By taking three different perspectives (biological

foundation, system engineering, and computer vision), it will be shown that the VAM concept

is central to the cognitive capabilities of the system and leads to a more general object

recognition framework.

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