Biologically inspired approaches to computer vision

2019-04-26In this thesis two biologically inspired projects are designed and implemented in the field of computer vision. The first relies on human biology’s superior decision making and mobility to work in a human-in-the-loop system. This system was able to achieve perfect accuracy on a task where the only external perception was with a digital camera. The second project is a modification to modern artificial neural networks. It is founded on the idea that biological dendrites perform complex nonlinear computations of presynaptic input prior to that input reaching the cell body. The backpropagation of traditional neural network learning is modified in a paradigm we call “Perforated Backpropagation” to only flow through a subset of nodes representing neurons, while skipping nodes representing dendrite branches which can learn through a different mechanism