Comparing the ability of humans and DNNs to recognise closed contours in cluttered images
Abstract
Given the recent success of machine vision algorithms in solving complex visual inference tasks, it becomes increasingly challenging to find tasks for which machines are still outperformed by humans. We seek to identify such tasks and test them under controlled settings. Here we compare human and machine performance in one candidate task: discriminating closed and open contours. We generated contours using simple lines of varying length and angle, and minimised statistical regularities that could provide cues. It has been shown that DNNs trained for object recognition are very sensitive to texture cues (Gatys et al., 2015). We use this insight to maximize the difficulty of the task for the DNN by adding random natural images to the background. Humans performed a 2IFC task discriminating closed and open contours (100 ms presentation) with and without background images. We trained a readout network to …
Wieland Brendel
Principal Investigator (PI)
Wieland Brendel received his Diploma in physics from the University of Regensburg (2010) and his Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from the École normale supérieure in Paris (2014). He joined the University of Tübingen as a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Matthias Bethge, became a Principal Investigator and Team Lead in the Tübingen AI Center (2018) and an Emmy Noether Group Leader for Robust Machine Learning (2020). In May 2022, Wieland joined the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems as an independent Group Leader and is now a Hector-endowed Fellow at the ELLIS Institute Tübingen (since September 2023). He received the 2023 German Pattern Recognition Award for his substantial contributions on robust, generalisable and interpretable machine vision. Aside of his research, Wieland co-founded a nationwide school competition (bw-ki.de) and a machine learning startup focused on visual quality control.