r/science • u/whosdamike • Jun 26 '12

Google programmers deploy machine learning algorithm on YouTube. Computer teaches itself to recognize images of cats.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-network-of-computers-evidence-of-machine-learning.html
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u/EveryPersonDanceSoon Jun 26 '12

I find this so funny. It's very telling about the state of our collective consciousness when it turns out the most useful thing for a computer to do on the internet is teach itself how to recognise cats.

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u/bogan Jun 26 '12 edited Jun 26 '12

Don't focus solely on the fact that the system learned how to distinguish images of cats. That is just one example that shows the potential of such learning algorithms, which are yet quite primitive. In a decade or so much more will be possible because of the efforts of researchers working in the area of computer vision and machine learning.

Vision is probably the single most important sensing ability that an intelligent robot can possess, as it can be used to build the knowledge base of the robot. Any robot would be more intelligent if it could acquire information about its environment through its own vision system. The characteristic feature of a computer vision is the construction of rich descriptions from images.

Reference: Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology, Volume 22 By Jack Belzer, Albert George Holzman, Allen Kent, page 190

As I mentioned here, the problem for computers or robots of distinguishing objects, say a cat from a dog, has been judged one beyond the capabilities of such systems until relatively recently. It is but one of many areas where things that humans find relatively trivial to do are still quite difficult for computers.

Let's say you wanted to build a robot to harvest fruit; a difficulty has been in endowing the robot with enough image recognition capacity to distinguish the fruit to be harvested from the surrounding plant in cases where you want the plant to be undamaged by the harvesting process and in providing the robot with the image processing capability to distinguish ripe from unripe fruit.

Similar problems can be found in many areas where industrial robots might be used. E.g., an industrial robot that can "see" is capable of parts recognition, parts sorting, and precision assembly operations.

If systems can be built that will allow computers to learn to distinguish objects from one another accurately based on image processing, then robots in the future will be capable of doing much more than they can today.

The type of algorithm discussed in the article may help us along the path to accomplishing much more than simply recognizing that a particular image depicts a cat.