New computer vision challenge wants to teach robots to see in 3D

Computer vision is ready for its next big test: seeing in 3D. The ImageNet Challenge, which has boosted the development of image-recognition algorithms, will be replaced by a new competition next year that aims to help robots see the world in all its depth. Since 2010, researchers have trained image recognition algorithms on the ImageNet database, a go-to set of more than 14 million images hand-labelled with information about the objects they depict. The algorithms learn to classify the objects in the photos into different categories, such as house, steak or Alsatian. Almost all computer vision systems are trained like this before being fine-tuned on a more specific set of images for different tasks.