Facebook opens its advanced AI vision tech to everyone

But a machine sees none of this; to a machine, it's just a bunch of pixels. It's up to computer-vision technology like the one developed at FAIR to segment each object out. Considering that real-world objects come in so many shapes and sizes as well as the fact that photos are subject to varying backgrounds and lighting conditions, it's easy to see why visual recognition is so complex. The answer, Dollar writes, lies in deep convolutional neural networks that are "trained rather than designed." The networks essentially learn from millions of annotated examples over time to identify the objects. "The first stage would be to look at different parts of the image that could be interesting," he says. "The second step is to then say, 'OK, that's a sheep,' or'that's a dog.' "Our whole goal is to get at all the pixels, to get at all the information in the image," he says.