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Performance comparison of a neural network with human observers on a visual target detection task

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Abstract

An experiment is described which compares the performance of a neural network to human performance on a visual task which consists of detecting a target in a background image of correlated noise. A three-layer, feed-forward, multi-layer perceptron is trained to indicate the presence or absence of a target in images also presented to human observers. The basis for the comparison between the network and the human observers is the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. Network performance is comparable to human performance for this particular task.

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  1. Environmental Research Institute of Michigan, 1501 Wilson Boulevard, Suite 1105, 22209, Arlington, VA, USA

    J. K. Mangis, R. B. Voas, W. T. Zink, K. Tiplitz Blackwell & T. P. Vogl

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  1. J. K. Mangis
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  2. R. B. Voas
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  3. W. T. Zink
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  4. K. Tiplitz Blackwell
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  5. T. P. Vogl
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Mangis, J.K., Voas, R.B., Zink, W.T. et al. Performance comparison of a neural network with human observers on a visual target detection task. Biol. Cybern. 62, 185–191 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00198093

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00198093

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