Biologically inspired visual computing: the state of the art

Visual information is highly advantageous for the evolutionary success of almost all animals. This information is likewise critical for many computing tasks, and visual computing has achieved tremendous successes in numerous applications over the last 60 years or so. In that time, the development of visual computing has moved forwards with inspiration from biological mechanisms many times. In particular, deep neural networks were inspired by the hierarchical processing mechanisms that exist in the visual cortex of primate brains (including ours), and have achieved huge breakthroughs in many domain-specific visual tasks. In order to better understand biologically inspired visual computing, we will present a survey of the current work, and hope to offer some new avenues for rethinking visual computing and designing novel neural network architectures.