JPMAX: Learning to Recognize Moving Objects as a Model-fitting Problem

Unsupervised learning procedures have been successful at low-level feature extraction and preprocessing of raw sensor data. So far, however, they have had limited success in learning higher-order representations, e.g., of objects in visual images. A promising approach is to maximize some measure of agreement between the outputs of two groups of units which receive inputs physically separated in space, time or modality, as in (Becker and Hinton, 1992; Becker, 1993; de Sa, 1993). Using the same approach, a much simpler learning procedure is proposed here which discovers features in a single-layer network consisting of several populations of units, and can be applied to multi-layer networks trained one layer at a time. When trained with this algorithm on image sequences of moving geometric objects a two-layer network can learn to perform accurate position-invariant object classification.