Neural Prothesisesisessss

Most neural prosthetics (this isn't invasive-but you get the point) are made specifically to help disabled people - deaf, blind, paralyzed, etc. This one is geared toward optimizing our natural ability to recognize interesting objects/people in scenes. This device seems specifically geared toward military and intelligence settings, but things like this should start becoming more common in our day to day lives. The idea behind this device is right on, in that computers and humans have distinct advantages and disadvantages when it comes to vision and this device attempts to combine all the good aspects, not depending too much on bad computer vision.

I'm looking forward to strapping on a couple electrodes, some eye tracking equipment and getting to work.

From Wired News:

The system harnesses the brain's well-known ability to recognize an image much faster than the person can identify it.

"Our human visual system is the ultimate visual processor," says Sajda. "We are just trying to couple that with computer vision techniques to make searching through large volumes of imagery more efficient."

The brain emits a signal as soon as it sees something interesting, and that "aha" signal can be detected by an electroencephalogram, or EEG cap. While users sift through streaming images or video footage, the technology tags the images that elicit a signal, and ranks them in order of the strength of the neural signatures. Afterwards, the user can examine only the information that their brains identified as important, instead of wading through thousands of images.

No existing computer vision systems connect with the human brain, and computers on their own don't do well at identifying unusual events or specific targets.