Human vision--a challenge for AI

Achieving diversity in human vision is one of the major challenges for AI research. In the vast majority of cases, we are better than machines at understanding the world around us. But machines are catching up--slowly but surely. "Within a single day we humans can go from driving a car to free diving, and continue to reading the newspaper and navigating a dense forest--all without a great deal of effort. For a robot, doing the same things would currently be impossible," says Michael Felsberg, professor at Linköping University and one of Sweden's foremost researchers in computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI). That we humans can do all this, and much more, is largely due to vision.