Blog: New Insight Into How Bees See

New Insight Into How Bees See
Monash University (01/23/09) Blair, Samantha

Monash University bee researcher Adrian Dyer has made a discovery that could lead to improved facial-recognition systems: honeybees can learn to recognize human faces even when seen from different angles. "What we have shown is that the bee brain, which contains less than 1 million neurons, is actually very good at learning to master complex tasks," he says. "Computer and imaging technology programmers who are working on solving complex visual recognition tasks using minimal hardware resources will find this research useful." Dyer says bees use a mechanism of interpolating or image averaging previously seen views to recognize faces from new angles. His study found that the highly constrained neural resources of bees, which have brains only 0.01 percent the size of a human brain, have evolved so that they can process complex visual recognition tasks. "The relationships between different components of the object often dramatically change when viewed from different angles, but it is amazing to find the bees' brains have evolved clever mechanisms for problem solving which may help develop improved models for [artificial intelligence] face-recognition systems," Dyer says.

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