The Active Perception Laboratory (APL) is an interdisciplinary research center founded by Professor Tai Sing Lee in 1997 with his first two graduate students, Stella Yu and Richard Romero, in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and in the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition -- a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh. The primary mission of the APL is to discover the organizing computational principles of the visual system, and to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying visual perception, spatial reasoning and object recognition using an integrated approach.

Our laboratory provides interdisciplinary training to every individual postdoctoral fellow or graduate student. Most APL members have been solidly trained in one of the physical or applied science disciplines such as computer science, mathematics, physics, and biomedical engineering. Here, they engage simultaneously in computational and neurophysiological studies. Our unique strength is our integrated approach that combines concepts and techniques in engineering, mathematics, physics and computer science with conventional and advanced recording methods in neurophysiology to study the computational and neural basis of vision.

• Natural Scene Statistics
• Hierarchical Bayesian Inference
• Surface Inference & Representation
• Dynamic Motion Perception
• Contextual Form Analysis
• Attention and Eye Movement
• Learning and Adaptation
• Structure of Neural Codes

Our long-term goal is to construct an intelligent and adaptive machine vision system that can approximate most of our visual functions. We hope our work will advance understanding of the computational principles and representational strategies of the visual system, and provide the foundation for developing therapeutic treatments and neural interfaces that either restore vision or at least alleviate the suffering of the visually impaired.