Mechanisms underlying visual object recognition in primates:research progress / 中国药理学与毒理学杂志

ABSTRACT

The capability of visual object recognition in primates is excellent, which is crucial to their survival. The investigation and analysis of the neural mechanisms underlying the visual object recognition in primates might bring dramatic breakthroughs to the brain-like machine vision.There are hierarchical structures, parallel pathways, feedback mechanisms, attention and visual search in the visual system of primates, which makes the visual object recognition in primates accurate, effective, flexible and energy-saving. The visual system of primates might achieve object detection through fast image segmentation by global precedence.The categorization manner of object encoding and storage makes possible the quick classification of detected objects.The potential target is selected by comparing the object and internal template of the target. The orienting between detected objects is guided by feature-based attention and spatial attention. The final step is the identification of the potential target. Previous studies of the visual object recognition in primates have made a series of progress.However, the detailed mechanisms of neuronal coding remain unclear and need further investigations.