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Arash Akbarinia, & C. Alejandro Parraga. (2018). Feedback and Surround Modulated Boundary Detection. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 126(12), 1367–1380.
Abstract: Edges are key components of any visual scene to the extent that we can recognise objects merely by their silhouettes. The human visual system captures edge information through neurons in the visual cortex that are sensitive to both intensity discontinuities and particular orientations. The “classical approach” assumes that these cells are only responsive to the stimulus present within their receptive fields, however, recent studies demonstrate that surrounding regions and inter-areal feedback connections influence their responses significantly. In this work we propose a biologically-inspired edge detection model in which orientation selective neurons are represented through the first derivative of a Gaussian function resembling double-opponent cells in the primary visual cortex (V1). In our model we account for four kinds of receptive field surround, i.e. full, far, iso- and orthogonal-orientation, whose contributions are contrast-dependant. The output signal from V1 is pooled in its perpendicular direction by larger V2 neurons employing a contrast-variant centre-surround kernel. We further introduce a feedback connection from higher-level visual areas to the lower ones. The results of our model on three benchmark datasets show a big improvement compared to the current non-learning and biologically-inspired state-of-the-art algorithms while being competitive to the learning-based methods.
Keywords: Boundary detection; Surround modulation; Biologically-inspired vision
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Domicele Jonauskaite, Nele Dael, C. Alejandro Parraga, Laetitia Chevre, Alejandro Garcia Sanchez, & Christine Mohr. (2018). Stripping #The Dress: The importance of contextual information on inter-individual differences in colour perception. PSYCHO R - Psychological Research, , 1–15.
Abstract: In 2015, a picture of a Dress (henceforth the Dress) triggered popular and scientific interest; some reported seeing the Dress in white and gold (W&G) and others in blue and black (B&B). We aimed to describe the phenomenon and investigate the role of contextualization. Few days after the Dress had appeared on the Internet, we projected it to 240 students on two large screens in the classroom. Participants reported seeing the Dress in B&B (48%), W&G (38%), or blue and brown (B&Br; 7%). Amongst numerous socio-demographic variables, we only observed that W&G viewers were most likely to have always seen the Dress as W&G. In the laboratory, we tested how much contextual information is necessary for the phenomenon to occur. Fifty-seven participants selected colours most precisely matching predominant colours of parts or the full Dress. We presented, in this order, small squares (a), vertical strips (b), and the full Dress (c). We found that (1) B&B, B&Br, and W&G viewers had selected colours differing in lightness and chroma levels for contextualized images only (b, c conditions) and hue for fully contextualized condition only (c) and (2) B&B viewers selected colours most closely matching displayed colours of the Dress. Thus, the Dress phenomenon emerges due to inter-individual differences in subjectively perceived lightness, chroma, and hue, at least when all aspects of the picture need to be integrated. Our results support the previous conclusions that contextual information is key to colour perception; it should be important to understand how this actually happens.
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David Berga, Xose R. Fernandez-Vidal, Xavier Otazu, V. Leboran, & Xose M. Pardo. (2019). Psychophysical evaluation of individual low-level feature influences on visual attention. VR - Vision Research, 154, 60–79.
Abstract: In this study we provide the analysis of eye movement behavior elicited by low-level feature distinctiveness with a dataset of synthetically-generated image patterns. Design of visual stimuli was inspired by the ones used in previous psychophysical experiments, namely in free-viewing and visual searching tasks, to provide a total of 15 types of stimuli, divided according to the task and feature to be analyzed. Our interest is to analyze the influences of low-level feature contrast between a salient region and the rest of distractors, providing fixation localization characteristics and reaction time of landing inside the salient region. Eye-tracking data was collected from 34 participants during the viewing of a 230 images dataset. Results show that saliency is predominantly and distinctively influenced by: 1. feature type, 2. feature contrast, 3. temporality of fixations, 4. task difficulty and 5. center bias. This experimentation proposes a new psychophysical basis for saliency model evaluation using synthetic images.
Keywords: Visual attention; Psychophysics; Saliency; Task; Context; Contrast; Center bias; Low-level; Synthetic; Dataset
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David Berga, & Xavier Otazu. (2022). A neurodynamic model of saliency prediction in v1. NEURALCOMPUT - Neural Computation, 34(2), 378–414.
Abstract: Lateral connections in the primary visual cortex (V1) have long been hypothesized to be responsible for several visual processing mechanisms such as brightness induction, chromatic induction, visual discomfort, and bottom-up visual attention (also named saliency). Many computational models have been developed to independently predict these and other visual processes, but no computational model has been able to reproduce all of them simultaneously. In this work, we show that a biologically plausible computational model of lateral interactions of V1 is able to simultaneously predict saliency and all the aforementioned visual processes. Our model's architecture (NSWAM) is based on Penacchio's neurodynamic model of lateral connections of V1. It is defined as a network of firing rate neurons, sensitive to visual features such as brightness, color, orientation, and scale. We tested NSWAM saliency predictions using images from several eye tracking data sets. We show that the accuracy of predictions obtained by our architecture, using shuffled metrics, is similar to other state-of-the-art computational methods, particularly with synthetic images (CAT2000-Pattern and SID4VAM) that mainly contain low-level features. Moreover, we outperform other biologically inspired saliency models that are specifically designed to exclusively reproduce saliency. We show that our biologically plausible model of lateral connections can simultaneously explain different visual processes present in V1 (without applying any type of training or optimization and keeping the same parameterization for all the visual processes). This can be useful for the definition of a unified architecture of the primary visual cortex.
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Olivier Penacchio, Xavier Otazu, Arnold J Wilkings, & Sara M. Haigh. (2023). A mechanistic account of visual discomfort. FN - Frontiers in Neuroscience, 17.
Abstract: Much of the neural machinery of the early visual cortex, from the extraction of local orientations to contextual modulations through lateral interactions, is thought to have developed to provide a sparse encoding of contour in natural scenes, allowing the brain to process efficiently most of the visual scenes we are exposed to. Certain visual stimuli, however, cause visual stress, a set of adverse effects ranging from simple discomfort to migraine attacks, and epileptic seizures in the extreme, all phenomena linked with an excessive metabolic demand. The theory of efficient coding suggests a link between excessive metabolic demand and images that deviate from natural statistics. Yet, the mechanisms linking energy demand and image spatial content in discomfort remain elusive. Here, we used theories of visual coding that link image spatial structure and brain activation to characterize the response to images observers reported as uncomfortable in a biologically based neurodynamic model of the early visual cortex that included excitatory and inhibitory layers to implement contextual influences. We found three clear markers of aversive images: a larger overall activation in the model, a less sparse response, and a more unbalanced distribution of activity across spatial orientations. When the ratio of excitation over inhibition was increased in the model, a phenomenon hypothesised to underlie interindividual differences in susceptibility to visual discomfort, the three markers of discomfort progressively shifted toward values typical of the response to uncomfortable stimuli. Overall, these findings propose a unifying mechanistic explanation for why there are differences between images and between observers, suggesting how visual input and idiosyncratic hyperexcitability give rise to abnormal brain responses that result in visual stress.
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