human perception

Perception refers to the process and experience by which the raw sensation of our senses (such as sight and sound) becomes meaningful. AI tries to emulate these proceses in computer vision and natural language processing as low-level processing is used to drive more semantic understanding.

While it is easiest to think of a bottom up process from raw sensation to perception, in fact in human cognition there are also top-down processes at work – we see what we expect to see. This can aid disambiguation, but also can have problems if high-level expectations become locked in. Computer perception is also most successful when there is a mix of bottom-up and top-down processes.