Sensing scenes with silicon

Scene analysis, the process of converting sensory information from peripheral receptors into a representation of objects in the external world, is central to our human experience of perception. Through our efforts to design systems for object recognition and for robot navigation, we have come to appreciate that a number of common themes apply across the sensory modalities of vision, audition, and olfaction; and many apply across species ranging from invertebrates to mammals. These themes include the need for adaptation in the periphery and trade-offs between selectivity for frequency or molecular structure with resolution in time or space. In addition, neural mechanisms involving coincidence detection are found in many different subsystems that appear to implement cross-correlation or autocorrelation computations.