Just as the Big Bad Wolf promised Little Red Riding Hood that his bigger eyes were “the better to see you with,” a machine’s ability to see the world around it is benefiting from bigger computers and more accurate mathematical calculations.

The improvement was visible in contest results released Monday evening by computer scientists and companies that sponsor an annual challenge to measure improvements in the state of machine vision technology.

Started in 2010 by Stanford, Princeton and Columbia University scientists, the Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge this year drew 38 entrants from 13 countries. The groups use advanced software, in most cases modeled loosely on the biological vision systems, to detect, locate and classify a huge set of images taken from Internet sources like Twitter. The contest was sponsored this year by Google, Stanford, Facebook and the University of North Carolina.

Contestants run their recognition programs on high-performance computers based in many cases on specialized processors called G.P.U.s, for graphic processing units