Large-scale functional models of visual cortex for remote sensing

Neuroscience has revealed many properties of neurons and of the functional organization of visual cortex that are believed to be essential to human vision, but are missing in standard artificial neural networks. Equally important may be the sheer scale of visual cortex requiring ~1 petaflop of computation, while the scale of human visual experience greatly exceeds standard computer vision datasets: the retina delivers ~1 petapixel/year to the brain, driving learning at many levels of the cortical system. We describe work at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to develop large-scale functional models of visual cortex on LANL's Roadrunner petaflop supercomputer. An initial run of a simple region V1 code achieved 1.144 petaflops during trials at the IBM facility in Poughkeepsie, NY (June 2008). Here, we present criteria for assessing when a set of learned local representations is ¿complete¿ along with general criteria for assessing computer vision models based on their projected scaling behavior. Finally, we extend one class of biologically-inspired learning models to problems of remote sensing imagery.