The findings show that despite the highly constrained neural resources of the insects (their brains are 0.01 per cent the size of the human brain) their ability has evolved so that they're able to process complex visual recognition tasks.
The researchers individually trained different groups of free flying bees with a sugar reward for making correct choices, or alternatively the bees were punished with a bitter tasting solution for incorrect choices. Faces were presented on a vertical screen and bees slowly learnt to fly to the correct target faces. Over the course of a day a bee brain learned a complex task, and then when tested in non-rewarded tests (to totally excluded cues like olfaction) only bees that had experience multiple views (e.g. faces at both 0° and 60°) were able to solve a novel rotational angle of 30°.
Faces can dramatically change appearance when seen from different viewpoints, since the relationship between elements like nose and eyes change depending upon viewing angle. New research says bees solve this difficult visual problem by averaging previously learnt views. Credit: Monash University
"What we have shown is that the bee brain, which contains less than 1 million neurons, is actually very good at learning to master complex tasks. Computer and imaging technology programmers who are working on solving complex visual recognition tasks using minimal hardware resources will find this research useful," Dr Dyer said. "Most current artificial intelligence (AI) recognition systems perform poorly at reliably recognising faces from different viewpoints. However the bees have shown they can recognise novel views of rotated faces using a mechanism of interpolating or image averaging previously learnt views."
The study, performed over two years in Australia and Germany by Dr Dyer with the support of the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), and Dr Quoc Vuong from Newcastle University UK, was published in PLoS ONE.
"Bee brains clearly use image interpolation to solve the problem. In other words, bees that had learnt what a particular face looked like from two different viewpoints could then recognise a novel view of this target face. However, bees that had only learnt a single view could not recognise novel views," Dr Dyer said. "The relationships between different components of the object often dramatically change when viewed from different angles but it is amazing to find the bees' brains have evolved clever mechanisms for problem solving which may help develop improved models for AI face recognition systems," Dr Dyer said.