Seeing the Forest For the Trees 64
swframe writes "A new object recognition system developed at MIT and UCLA looks for rudimentary visual features shared by multiple examples of the same object. Then it looks for combinations of those features shared by multiple examples, and combinations of those combinations, and so on, until it has assembled a model of the object that resembles a line drawing. Popular Science has a summary of the research. I've been working on something similar and I think this accomplishment looks very promising."
They just learn all the types (Score:4, Insightful)
Theres no way just from looking at pictures of dogs that you could tell they're all the same species. There are some characterstics that some breads have in common with others (other than the obvious 4 legs etc) but they don't all overlap. With something like this its more than a simple case of pattern recognition - its aquired knowledge.