What’s Pattern Recognition?

The subject of pattern recognition has come up a lot lately as computers and technological devices like smart phones have begun to interact with our daily lives. Pattern recognition affects so many of our experiences now, from our social media engagement to our shopping preferences, and it has major implications in critical sectors like medicine and finance. So, what’s pattern recognition?

Pattern Recognition

Pattern recognition is a way of analyzing data and information that we receive.

It is a process familiar to almost all life forms, and indeed it is essential to existence and evolution.

Animals need to recognize seasonal patterns, patterns of predators, and patterns of life systems enable them to eat, procreate, and feed their young. They are inherent traits that virtually all life forms must develop in order to survive.

Humans need to recognize patterns in order not only to survive but also to function in society and within communities.

We need to recognize traffic patterns, weather patterns, and daily existence patterns.

From as early as our first educational experiences, we have to recognize the patterns of the days of the week. Babies learn from a young age what they will do when they rise, after lunch, and before bed, for example. All because of pattern recognition. The routine is a result of a pattern, and the pattern informs the routine.

School children recognize the stimulus of a bell ringing, of a teacher sending signals, and of interaction on the playground.

Then, as they get older and enter the workforce, they either repeat those patterns or work to break them. Some children may reject the patterns they learned from an early age and go into business for themselves rather than replicating the school day at a job. Others will continue with those same patterns for the rest of their lives.

What is even more important about patterns for humans is not so much the patterns themselves but what we do with those patterns.

In medicine, for example, when we see a pattern across a large percentage of patients, doctors can draw logical conclusions to make diagnoses.

In pharmaceuticals, when scientists see a repeating pattern of success in response to stimulus, they can create life-saving drugs.

In business, companies can recognize patterns drawn from Big Data about purchases and feedback and improve products and increase profits.

Even human resources can use pattern recognition to see what encourages longer-term employment of staff (which is much better for the bottom line) and work to improve company working conditions.

Machine Learning Pattern Recognition

In recent decades, machine learning has taken quite the load off of humans when it comes to pattern recognition. As software engineers have designed systems to recognize patterns, humans can now save time and money by the millions, of hours and dollars.

Now, humans are responsible for feeding the data into a software system and the system can much more quickly identify any patterns it has been designed to recognize.

In even more recent years, those machines have even been able continue to learn and increase their intelligence as they receive additional data and input.

Furthermore, now that many humans have been trained to input data themselves by filling out questionnaires online and storing much of their information online, a ton of labor is freed to do other tasks. Where an employee once had to sit with an individual to take information down on a piece of paper and then enter that information into a system that could then analyze data and recognize patterns, now an individual can enter their own information directly into the system and the machine can take it from there.

What’s Pattern Recognition in AI?

This shift and rapid advancement in the use of artificial intelligence means not only that time and money are saved but also that more lives can potentially be saved.

Medical information can be recognized and shared dramatically quickly. Medicine can be formulated in days and weeks rather than months and years.

And of course, in the worlds of business and finance, companies can cut costs and the market stands to continue to return profits at a virtually exponential rate.

Finally, applications are now in place to help businesses both big and small with their daily mundane tasks like recognizing data and patterns.

At Oculyze, we have developed image analysis technology that combines methodical pattern recognition with artificial intelligence and deep learning, allowing us to develop more robust systems with less data than with deep learning alone. We automate expert image analysis combining methodical pattern recognition with artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning to create some of the best computer vision software money can buy. This base technology, used in the Oculyze yeast cell counters – for brewers, vintners and bioethanol producers, has convinced hundreds of yeast labs, ethanol refineries, breweries and wineries of all sizes around the world.

By combining AI and the cloud we have created a system that is flexible and affordable, using the experience from the many for the benefit of each individual. The samples from the devices allow the algorithms in the cloud to keep learning and improving the computer vision software for all users. This is how Oculyze computer vision software keeps getting better and better.

Let us help you digitalize the tedious and error prone manual analysis processes! Check out our Product section for more details on our fully released products and our Image Analysis Platform for more use cases in various stages of development.

With our Image Analysis Platform, you can save hundreds of hours of work that would have gone into manual labor. Image analysis automation provides you with accurate results and secure data management in less time, so you can save your resources for something that brings more value to your business.

Let artificial intelligence do the hard work for you. Start saving time and costs now! Want to know more? Contact us and we’ll be happy to help!