A comparison between humans and AI at recognizing objects in unusual poses

Abstract

Deep learning is closing the gap with humans on several object recognition benchmarks. Here we investigate this gap in the context of challenging images where objects are seen from unusual viewpoints. We find that humans excel at recognizing objects in unusual poses, in contrast with state-of-the-art pretrained networks (EfficientNet, SWAG, ViT, SWIN, BEiT, ConvNext) which are systematically brittle in this condition. Remarkably, as we limit image exposure time, human performance degrades to the level of deep networks, suggesting that additional mental processes (requiring additional time) take place when humans identify objects in unusual poses. Finally, our analysis of error patterns of humans vs. networks reveals that even time-limited humans are dissimilar to feed-forward deep networks. We conclude that more work is needed to bring computer vision systems to the level of robustness of the human visual system. Understanding the nature of the mental processes taking place during extra viewing time may be key to attain such robustness.