Play a Fun Game of Stump the Next-Gen Photo Recognition Program

Earlier this year a team at Oxford University’s Department of Engineering Sciences published a paper called “Conditional Random Fields as Recurrent Neural Networks,” about assigning semantic properties to images using pattern recognition software. The idea is to map the world in the same way Facebook has mapped the human countenance. But “object delineation” is still an inexact science.

We threw the new Oxford machine some curveballs. Turns out, the thing can hit for average.

1. Picasso’s Three Musicians

Despite the world’s greatest abstract cubist painter trying to break down the human form in the best artistic representation he could, it looks like he couldn’t escape the digital know-how of the demo. There is a person in there somewhere, and a chair, but the softward did miss out on the musical instruments.

2. Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks

The demo’s single “person” label for Hopper’s most famous representation of urban loneliness and despair is more perfect than this semi-intelligent piece of segmented image software realizes. Give this thing an art history degree right now.

3. Optimus Prime

This is where the cracks begin to show. We guess Optimus is technically a person, and who knows there may be a motorbike in there somewhere — he is a Transformer after all. But saying there isn’t a car in there just makes us skeptical of this whole thing. He’s the leader of the Auotbots! For shame Semantic Image Segmentation Live Demo.

4. Luke Skywalker

Here’s Luke just chilling on Hoth right before being mauled by a Wampa in The Empire Strikes Back. It’s got the “person” bit down again, but “bird”? Nope, that’s a Tauntaun.

5. Muhammed Ali Defeating Sonny Liston

There is not a horse in this picture. Or, if there is a horse in this picture, we want it pointed out and we want the back story.

6. Homer Simpson Choking Bart Simpson

Based on the criteria available, this one is actually fairly accurate.

7. The Terminator

Now we’re back in the game. Good call, Semantic Image Segmentation Live Demo, that is, in fact, the T-800 cruising with John Connor on a motorbike.

8. Buzz Aldrin Walking on the Moon

That’s one small step for man, one giant leap back for image segmentation. Unless some invisible aliens are cruising by on a “motorbike” somewhere behind Buzz, this one is just wrong.

9/. Psychedelic Jesus

Whooooaaa trippy, dude. We didn’t think computer software programs were into LSD but now that the drugs are kicking in we do see a bird, a bottle, a person, and a potted plant in this photo. This thing is incredible.