Memory organization for invariant object recognition and categorization

Using distributed representations of objects enables artificial systems to be more versatile regarding inter- and intra-category variability, improving the appearance-based modeling of visual object understanding. They are built on the hypothesis that object models are structured dynamically using relatively invariant patches of information arranged in visual dictionaries, which can be shared across objects from the same category. However, implementing distributed representations efficiently to support the complexity of invariant object recognition and categorization remains a research problem of outstanding significance for the biological, the psychological, and the computational approach to understanding visual perception. The present work focuses on solutions driven by top-down object knowledge. It is motivated by the idea that, equipped with sensors and processing mechanisms from the neural pathways serving visual perception, biological systems are able to define efficient measures of similarities between properties observed in objects and use these relationships to form natural clusters of object parts that share equivalent ones. Based on the comparison of stimulus-response signatures from these object-to-memory mappings, biological systems are able to identify objects and their kinds. The present work combines biologically inspired mathematical models to develop memory frameworks for artificial systems, where these invariant patches are represented with regular-shaped graphs, whose nodes are labeled with elementary features that capture texture information from object images. It also applies unsupervised clustering techniques to these graph image features to corroborate the existence of natural clusters within their data distribution and determine their composition. The properties of such computational theory include self-organization and intelligent matching of these graph image features based on the similarity and co-occurrence of their captured texture information. The performance to model invariant object recognition and categorization of feature-based artificial systems equipped with each of the developed memory frameworks is validated applying standard methodologies to well-known image libraries found in literature. Additionally, these artificial systems are cross-compared with state-of-the-art alternative solutions. In conclusion, the findings of the present work convey implications for strategies and experimental paradigms to analyze human object memory as well as technical applications for robotics and computer vision.