The image recognition process

Having a computer or robot recognize an image is not as simple as taking two pictures and then saying "If picture A = picture B, then toy". We are actually going to have to do quite a bit of work to have the ability to recognize a variety of objects that are randomly rotated, strewn about, and at various distances. We could recognize simple shapes – hexagons, for instance, or simple color blobs, but nothing as complex as a toy stuffed dog. Writing a program that did some sort of analysis of an image and computed the pixels, colors, distributions, and ranges of every possible permutation would be extremely difficult, and the result very fragile – it would fail at the slightest change in lighting or color. I had a recent misadventure with a large robot that mistook an old, faded soft drink machine for its charging station –...