AI meets image analysis at the University of Adelaide

Researchers at the University of Adelaide are creating machines capable of undertaking complex tasks, acknowledging the outcomes and improving their performance accordingly. That's according to Professor Anton van den Hengel, Director of the Australian Institute for Machine Learning (AIML), who claimed the university's technology can "compete with, and sometimes exceed, human capabilities in tasks like recognition, statistical analysis and classification". The breakthrough, according to Prof van den Hengel, has been the advent of'deep learning' technology -- a form of machine learning (itself a subset of artificial intelligence) based on the human brain's neural networks. "That's enabled machines to distil and interpret huge amounts of prior and incoming information, and particularly visual information," he said. Prof Ian Reid, a senior colleague of Prof van den Hengel's and Deputy Director of the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision, agrees.