Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

Abstract: When a photon impinges on the retina, the light signal is transduced into an electrical signal. Afterward, the electrical signal is conveyed in turn to lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), visual cortex, inferior temporal cortex (ITC), prefrontal cortex (PFC), medial temporal lobe (MTL) and other brain areas, and thus we can perceive the visual world, recognise objects, identify our friends, analyse events, remember every happy time, and guide our actions toward specific objects. All these tasks are very tough challenges for current computers, so it essential to understand the biological visual system that can guide our research on computational vision. In this talk we discuss our recent work on computational modelling of the ventral path way. This is a further step of the recent MIT’s follow up to Hubel and Wiesel’s feed-forward hierarchy model published in 1959. We particularly considered the feedback process between the visual cortex and MTL that consolidates the memory and assists the visual recognition. Our preliminary experimental results on object recognition support our model. Surely, this model is general and can be adapted to model the dorsal path way for motion analysis. Short-Bio: Dacheng Tao received the Ph.D degree from the University of London. Currently, he is a NANYANG Assistant Professor in the Nanyang Technological University, a Research Associate Fellow in the University of London, a Visiting Professor in the Xidian University and a Guest Professor in the Wuhan University. He works on computational neuroscience, biologically inspired models, statistics and their applications in computational vision and video surveillance. He has authored more than 150 scientific articles at top venues including IEEE T-PAMI, T-IP, T-KDE, NIPS, KDD, ICDM, and AISTATS with best paper awards. He is an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (T-KDE) and Elsevier Neurocomputing. He has (co- )chaired more than 30 times for special sessions, invited sessions, workshops, panels and conferences. He has served for more than 110 major international conferences including ICDM, KDD, CVPR, ICCV, and ECCV, and more than 50 prestigious international journals. He is a member of IEEE and an IEEE TC on Cognitive Computing.