Making computers see

About

Background Imagery can be of immense value in the defence realm. Whether obtained through surveillance or other means, it can provide critical intelligence about physical environments, structures, objects and equipment, populations and more. Historically, however, extracting accurate, meaningful information from that imagery has been anything but easy. Although facial-recognition technology has come a long way in recent years, teams of analysts have still had to conduct the vast majority of image analysis by sight, and personally document their findings. Invention But according to Professor Anton van den Hengel of the University of Adelaide’s Australian Centre for Visual Technologies (ACVT), that’s about to change. His team has developed a system that not only allows computers to interpret images, but clearly and usefully respond to spontaneous questions about them. Benefits You can ask our system all kinds of ad-hoc questions about images—like what’s in them, numbers of specific items present, their colours, etc.—in plain English, and it will answer them virtually immediately, also in English. Beyond the obvious advantages for defence applications, the system also has the potential to enhance life throughout our community. Team The ACVT team, working within the University’s School of Computer Science, is leading the world on all international benchmarks in the VQA field, and are continuing to push their technology’s capabilities further. Recent stage We recently developed a method of bringing in linked, multi-tiered information from an external source so that highly complex questions about images could be answered.