Artificial Networks Shed Light on Human Face Recognition

From what we know how the brain works to artificial neural nets (ANN), which we know are very simplistic neural models, then back to the actual operation of the brain?

Artificial Networks Shed Light on Human Face Recognition  By Weizmann Institute of Science

A pair of face images that elicited dissimilar neuronal activation patterns.
Weizmann Institute of Science researchers are gaining new insights into humans' ability to recognize faces, through the use of deep neural networks.

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have gained new insights on humans' ability to recognize faces using deep neural networks.

The researchers compared brain activity to these networks by analyzing data from 33 epileptics with implanted brain electrodes as they were shown a series of faces, each of which triggered a unique neuronal activation pattern.

The neural network was shown the same images, to determine whether it would exhibit activation patterns similar to the human brain.  There were striking similarities, especially in the network's middle layers, which represent the actual pictorial appearance of the faces.

Weizmann's Shany Grossman said, "These findings can help advance our understanding of how face perception and recognition are encoded in the human brain [and] ... may also help to further improve the performance of neural networks, by tweaking them so as to bring them closer to the observed brain response patterns."

From Weizmann Institute of Science    View Full Article