Object and Face Recognition
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this course on how humans and machines recognize objects and faces. The first half covers the representation problem in object recognition, examining how three-dimensional objects can be encoded so they are efficiently identified from two-dimensional images, drawing on experimental, neural, and computational research. The second half turns to face recognition as a specialized, ecologically important case of object recognition, reviewing studies of human face recognition performance alongside computational systems built to replicate it. Materials include lecture notes, readings, and assignments from MIT's Brain and Cognitive Sciences department, free to access under a Creative Commons license with no certificate offered. The course suits students wanting a grounding in both the psychology and the computational modeling side of visual recognition.