Looking around the backyard helps to recognize faces and digits

Human beings have the ability to learn to recognize a new visual category based on only one or few training examples. Part of this ability might come from the use of knowledge from previous visual experiences. We show that such knowledge can be expressed as a set of “universal” visual features, which are learned from randomly collected natural scene images. Using these visual features, we have obtained state-of-the-art performance on several classification tasks using a single-layer classifier.