Imaging software relies on fewer pixels

摘要

It takes surprisingly few pixels of information to be able to identify the subject of an image, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; Cambridge, MA, USA) has found. The discovery could lead to advances in the automated identification of online images and, ultimately, provide a basis for computers to see as humans do. Antonio Torralba, assis-rntant professor in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and colleagues have been trying to find out what is the smallest amount of information-that is, the shortest numerical representation-that can be derived from an image that will provide a useful indication of its content.