Patent ID: 8447712

Claim:
An object recognition comprising: means for receiving images; and simulated neural circuitry for recognizing objects in received images, the simulated neural circuitry comprising a hierarchy of areas made up of neuronal elements, with each neuronal element comprising a tree of one or more branches, with each of the one or more branches being connected to receive inputs from multiple other neuronal elements, wherein the simulated neural circuitry is configured to: during a training process in which sequences of images representing objects moving through a visual field are exposed to the neural circuit, establish connectivity of the simulated neural circuitry using the sequences of images such that, after the connectivity is established, an image of each object, positioned at any location in that visual field, activates an invariant pattern of activity representing that object in outputs of a highest area of the simulated neural circuitry, and after the training process, recognize an object in a received image based on an image of the object activating the invariant pattern of activity representing that object in the outputs of the highest area of the simulated neural circuitry, wherein establishing the connectivity during the training process comprises, when images of the object presented within a certain window in time trigger inputs to a branch and activate the branch, connection between those temporally correlated inputs and the branch are strengthened, such that in each successively higher area of the hierarchy the image triggers an increasingly invariant pattern of activity.