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Inspired by Real Biology

In 1981, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel were awarded a Nobel Prize for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system.

In this work, they showed for the first time that the visual cortex in Macaque monkeys is highly structured, with many different identifiable functions being performed by the cells there.

Despite its exciting implications, Torsten and Wiesel's work has received limited application in the field of Computer Vision. The Foveola shape recognition engine is the first technology to integrate a broad range of these cellular functions - with ground-breaking results.

 
The Foveola

A very large part of the visual cortex in primates is devoted to processing nerve signals coming from the fovea, a tiny area near the centre of the eye's retina.

At the centre of the fovea is an even smaller region known as the foveola, containing a few thousand cone receptors in a tightly packed array.

When we view a scene, the tiny foveola region is sequentially fixated on different points of interest. This process seems to have great significance in interpreting our visual surroundings.

 
New Ways of Seeing

Inspired by the primate visual cortex, the innovative Foveola shape recognition engine uses a fast, simulated-cell process to generate a specific low-dimensional "code" for any given simple shape.

Excitingly, the Foveola engine groups related shapes into general classes very similar to those naturally used by humans: shapes that we consider similar have Foveola codes that are related numerically in straightforward ways.

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