The emergence of visual categories - A computational perspective

When we are born we do not know about sailing boats, frogs, cell-phones and wheelbarrows. By the time we reach school age we can easily recognize these categories of objects and many more using our visual system; by some estimates, we learn around 10 new categories per day with minimal supervision during the first few years of our lives. How can this happen? I will outline a computational approach to the problem of representing the visual properties of object categories, and of learning such models without supervision from cluttered images. Both static images of objects and dynamic displays such as the ones generated by human activity are handled by the theory. Its properties will be exemplified with experiments on a variety of categories