A Sensorimotor Perspective on Grounding the Semantic of Simple Visual Features

Abstract

In Machine Learning and Robotics, the semantic content of visual features is usually provided to the system by a human who interprets its content. On the contrary, strictly unsupervised approaches have difficulties relating the statistics of sensory inputs to their semantic content without also relying on prior knowledge introduced in the system. We propose in this paper to tackle this problem from a sensorimotor perspective. In line with the Sensorimotor Contingencies Theory, we make the fundamental assumption that the semantic content of sensory inputs at least partially stems from the way an agent can actively transform it. We illustrate our approach by formalizing how simple visual features can induce invariants in a naive agent's sensorimotor experience, and evaluate it on a simple simulated visual system. Without any a priori knowledge about the way its sensorimotor information is encoded, we show how an agent can characterize the uniformity and edge-ness of the visual features it interacts with.