The 'dark matter' of visual data can help AI understand images like humans

What makes us humans so good at making sense of visual data? That's a question that has preoccupied artificial intelligence and computer vision scientists for decades. Efforts at reproducing the capabilities of human vision have so far yielded results that are commendable but still leave much to be desired. Our current artificial intelligence algorithms can detect objects in images with remarkable accuracy, but only after they've seen many (thousands or maybe millions) examples and only if the new images are not too different from what they've seen before. There is a range of efforts aimed at solving the shallowness and brittleness of deep learning, the main AI algorithm used in computer vision today.