Machine Perception

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What Does Machine Perception Mean?

Machine perception is a term for technologies that simulate the ways that humans perceive the world around them. Any type of technology that simulates any human sense, whether it is sight, hearing, taste, touch or feel, could be labeled machine perception, but the overwhelming use of machine perception in the field relates to simulating the sense of sight.

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Techopedia Explains Machine Perception

One way that machine perception works is through the use of a principle called sensor fusion. In the human body, each of the two eyes relays its own visual data to the brain. The brain combines these two data streams, and processes them into a unified whole.

Up until quite recently, machine perception was largely unable to simulate this. However, with modern sensor fusion, the fundamental process becomes somewhat more straightforward. Engineers implement multiple sensors in a physical surveillance area. Using artificial intelligence principles, they build technologies that will fuse and interpret those combined data streams in a way that is similar to the way that human vision is brought to the human brain. Advances in machine perception have driven progress in handwriting recognition, image processing, document analysis and more.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology expert

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.