Classification and recognition of images of animate and inanimate objects

Abstract

The work of an operator in solving two classification problems when working with one image alphabet is studied. From ninety visual stimuli, half of the images contained animate objects, and the other half contained inanimate objects. The first task was to classify the images according to a semantic attribute—whether they contained an animate or inanimate object. This alphabet of stimuli was then subjected to wavelet filtering in a low- and high-spatial-frequency region, regardless of semantic significance. The second task was to classify the stimuli according to a physical attribute—a blurred or unblurred object in the image. Electrophysiological monitoring of the operator’s work—recording of the induced visual potentials from the entire surface of the head—made it possible to detect that, from the beginning of the stimulation until the organization of the motor response, parallel processing of the observed signal occurs according to the different semantic and physical attributes. The responses of the temporal and frontal sections of the brain associated with the semantics of the images are distinguished, even under those conditions in which the subject’s task was to classify the physical properties of an image of an object.