  While deep learning surpasses human-level performance in narrow and specific
vision tasks, it is fragile and over-confident in classification. For example,
minor transformations in perspective, illumination, or object deformation in
the image space can result in drastically different labeling, which is
especially transparent via adversarial perturbations. On the other hand, human
visual perception is orders of magnitude more robust to changes in the input
stimulus. But unfortunately, we are far from fully understanding and
integrating the underlying mechanisms that result in such robust perception. In
this work, we introduce a novel method of incorporating temporal dynamics into
static image understanding. We describe a neuro-inspired method that decomposes
a single image into a series of coarse-to-fine images that simulates how
biological vision integrates information over time. Next, we demonstrate how
our novel visual perception framework can utilize this information "over time"
using a biologically plausible algorithm with recurrent units, and as a result,
significantly improving its accuracy and robustness over standard CNNs. We also
compare our proposed approach with state-of-the-art models and explicitly
quantify our adversarial robustness properties through multiple ablation
studies. Our quantitative and qualitative results convincingly demonstrate
exciting and transformative improvements over the standard computer vision and
deep learning architectures used today.
