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New insight into how bees see

11 February 2009

Faces can dramatically change appearance when seen from different viewpoints. Bees solve this difficult visual problem by averaging previously learnt views.

Dr Adrian Dyer from the Department of Physiology has discovered that the bee brain, which is 0.01 per cent the size of the human brain, can learn to master complex visual recognition tasks like recognising human faces even when seen from different viewpoints.

Dr Dyer said the research could be applied in areas of new technology, particularly the development of imaging systems using minimal hardware resources.

The researchers individually trained different groups of free-flying bees using a sugar reward for correct choices and a bitter tasting solution for incorrect choices.

Faces were presented on a vertical screen and bees slowly learnt to fly to the correct target faces.

The bees were then tested in non-rewarded tests and those that had experienced multiple views (e.g. faces at both 0° and 60°) were able to pick the correct face from an angle of 30°.

"Bees that had learnt what a particular face looked like from two different viewpoints could recognise the face from previously unseen views or 'novel' views of rotated faces using a mechanism of interpolating or image averaging previously learnt views," Dr Dyer said.

"However bees that had only learnt a single view could not recognise the face from novel views."

Dr Dyer said the discovery helped answer a fundamental question about how brains solve complex image rotational problems by either image averaging or mentally rotating previously learnt views.

"The relationships between different components of the object often dramatically change when viewed from different angles but it is amazing to find the bees’ brains have evolved clever mechanisms for problem solving that may help develop improved models for artificial intelligent face recognition systems."