photoxelsFace Detection and Recognition is now prevalent in digital cameras which can detect many faces and even recognize those you tag, giving them preference as to focus and exposure. But Antonio Torralba is more concerned with what’s not the face in a photo: his Artificial Intelligence (A/I/) software tags all objects in an image and makes the image more easily searchable so as to be able to place the photo in an appropriate context. This ability will eventually mean that robots can recognize their surroundings, say in a house or office building, based on what furniture and objects they see around them.
Going one step further with this research, Torralba is also developing systems that can scan a short video clip and predict what is likely to happen next, based on the people and objects in the scene. This should eventually allow robots to anticipate how their actions will influence future events.
As a hobby, Torralba produces his own digital artwork by superimposing multiple images together. For example, he took 150 digital photographs, each containing a person in the center of the image, and combined them to produce a picture that seems to have been hand drawn with a pencil.
Read more about this line of research at: Physorg.
