Tag: darknet

The wondrous state of Computer Vision, and what the algorithms actually “see”

The wondrous state of Computer Vision, and what the algorithms actually “see”

The field of computer vision tries to replicate our human visual capabilities, allowing computers to perceive their environment in a same way as you and I do. The recent breakthroughs in this field are super exciting and I couldn’t but share them with you.

In the TED talk below by Joseph Redmon (PhD at the University of Washington) showcases the latest progressions in computer vision resulting, among others, from his open-source research on Darknet – neural network applications in C. Most impressive is the insane speed with which contemporary algorithms are able to classify objects. Joseph demonstrates this by detecting all kinds of random stuff practically in real-time on his phone! Moreover, you’ve got to love how well the system works: even the ties worn in the audience are classified correctly!

PS. please have a look at Joseph’s amazing My Little Pony-themed resumé.

The second talk, below, is more scientific and maybe even a bit dry at the start. Blaise Aguera y Arcas (engineer at Google) starts with a historic overview brain research but, fortunately, this serves a cause, as ~6 minutes in Blaise provides one of the best explanations I have yet heard of how a neural network processes images and learns to perceive and classify the underlying patterns. Blaise continues with a similarly great explanation of how this process can be reversed to generate weird, Asher-like images, one could consider creative art:

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An example of a reversed neural network thus “estimating” an image of a bird [via Youtube]
Blaise’s colleagues at Google took this a step further and used t-SNE to visualize the continuous space of animal concepts as perceived by their neural network, here a zoomed in part on the Armadillo part of the map, apparently closely located to fish, salamanders, and monkeys?

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A zoomed view of part of a t-SNE map of latent animal concepts generated by reversing a neural network [via Youtube]
We’ve seen these latent spaces/continua before. This example Andrej Karpathy shared immediately comes to mind:

Blaise’s presentaton you can find here:

If you want to learn more about this process of image synthesis through deep learning, I can recommend the scientific papers discussed by one of my favorite Youtube-channels, Two-Minute Papers. Karoly’s videos, such as the ones below, discuss many of the latest developments:

Let me know if you have any other video’s, papers, or materials you think are worthwhile!