"Visual" Turing Test

A computer that passes the new test would be able to say which people in this scene from Pushkar, India, are carrying objects and which are riding bikes.

Facebook’s algorithms can pick your face out of a crowd (or try to at least), but it still can’t tell if you are posing in a family portrait or drinking with buddies—it can’t tell you how you are interacting with others. In the future though, computers may be able to do just that. Now researchers have proposed a way to figure out just how smart computers are at visual identification. They call their test a visual Turing test, after the computer scientist Alan Turing’s test of whether a computer can display human-like intelligence. The popular perception of the test is that it's used to distinguish humans from computers—and one version is used to that effect, when you do a CAPTCHA to sign up for a new email. But artificial intelligence researchers really think of the test as a way to measure how advanced computer intelligence is so far. “There have been some impressive advances in computer vision in recent years,” Stuart Geman, a mathematics professor at Brown University and one of the researchers proposing the new evaluation, says in a press statement. “We felt that it might be time to raise the bar in terms of how these systems are evaluated and benchmarked.”
 Instead of simply recognizing that an image shows two people, the test sees if computers can figure out that the two people are having a conversation or even an argument. Currently, researchers use publicly available data sets to test their programs—MIT has LableMe, which uses crowdsourcing to identify the "car," "tree," and "building" in images, for example.
To improve on this and offer a greater challenge, researchers based at Brown came up with a framework for a standardized visual Turing test.