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New Image-Recognition Software

Question: What do you see in the red circles? A bottle, a cell phone, a person, a shoe? The answer: They're all the same. Professor Antonio Torralba,created these low-resolution images, in which the circled shapes were inserted and are all identical, to demonstrate how context affects our recognition of objects. Even the 'car' in the lower left image is the same object.
It takes surprisingly few pixels of information to be able to identify the subject of an image, a team led by an MIT researcher has found. The discovery could lead to great advances in the automated identification of online images and, ultimately, provide a basis for computers to see like humans do.
Antonio Torralba, assistant professor in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and colleagues have been trying to find out what is the smallest amount of information--that is, the shortest numerical representation--that can be derived from an image that will provide a useful indication of its content.