Pattern Recognition Technologies: Getting the Picture

Because the ability to recognize patterns is so ingrained, it seems easy. But attempts to program a computer to pick out individual words from the continuous flow of noise we call speech, to recognize the difference between a green apple and a tennis ball, to tell the difference between a female and male face, or to paraphrase a sentence have shown that pattern recognition is a sophisticated task.

Combine the ability to recognize objects and data patterns with a computer's fast computational abilities and round-the-clock hours, however, and you have the means to automatically organize mountains of video and audio, greatly improve the human-computer interface, and enable high-level security.

Pattern recognition is also intrinsic to computer vision, network intruder detection, forgery detection, biometrics, next-generation computer interfaces and automatic paraphrasing, translation and language understanding.

The report includes an executive summary, a list of 21 developments to look for as these cutting-edge technologies take shape, and a section of 29 researchers to watch, including links to their Web pages. It also includes a quick tour of 29 recent developments in eight areas and a section of 27 in-depth news stories from TRN.

The stories are organized into eight categories: data, multimedia, computer vision, security, interfaces, language processing and neural networks.

Technology Research News is an independent publisher and news service dedicated to covering technology research developments in university, corporate and government labs. TRN's Making the Future reports inform you about developments that are poised to make and break business ventures, affect day-to-day life, and shape tomorrow's society.