26,617 research outputs found
Contributions of cortical feedback to sensory processing in primary visual cortex
Closing the structure-function divide is more challenging in the brain than in any other organ (Lichtman and Denk, 2011). For example, in early visual cortex, feedback projections to V1 can be quantified (e.g., Budd, 1998) but the understanding of feedback function is comparatively rudimentary (Muckli and Petro, 2013). Focusing on the function of feedback, we discuss how textbook descriptions mask the complexity of V1 responses, and how feedback and local activity reflects not only sensory processing but internal brain states
Effects on orientation perception of manipulating the spatio–temporal prior probability of stimuli
Spatial and temporal regularities commonly exist in natural visual scenes. The knowledge of the probability structure of these regularities is likely to be informative for an efficient visual system. Here we explored how manipulating the spatio–temporal prior probability of stimuli affects human orientation perception. Stimulus sequences comprised four collinear bars (predictors) which appeared successively towards the foveal region, followed by a target bar with the same or different orientation. Subjects' orientation perception of the foveal target was biased towards the orientation of the predictors when presented in a highly ordered and predictable sequence. The discrimination thresholds were significantly elevated in proportion to increasing prior probabilities of the predictors. Breaking this sequence, by randomising presentation order or presentation duration, decreased the thresholds. These psychophysical observations are consistent with a Bayesian model, suggesting that a predictable spatio–temporal stimulus structure and an increased probability of collinear trials are associated with the increasing prior expectation of collinear events. Our results suggest that statistical spatio–temporal stimulus regularities are effectively integrated by human visual cortex over a range of spatial and temporal positions, thereby systematically affecting perception
Object segmentation in depth maps with one user click and a synthetically trained fully convolutional network
With more and more household objects built on planned obsolescence and
consumed by a fast-growing population, hazardous waste recycling has become a
critical challenge. Given the large variability of household waste, current
recycling platforms mostly rely on human operators to analyze the scene,
typically composed of many object instances piled up in bulk. Helping them by
robotizing the unitary extraction is a key challenge to speed up this tedious
process. Whereas supervised deep learning has proven very efficient for such
object-level scene understanding, e.g., generic object detection and
segmentation in everyday scenes, it however requires large sets of per-pixel
labeled images, that are hardly available for numerous application contexts,
including industrial robotics. We thus propose a step towards a practical
interactive application for generating an object-oriented robotic grasp,
requiring as inputs only one depth map of the scene and one user click on the
next object to extract. More precisely, we address in this paper the middle
issue of object seg-mentation in top views of piles of bulk objects given a
pixel location, namely seed, provided interactively by a human operator. We
propose a twofold framework for generating edge-driven instance segments.
First, we repurpose a state-of-the-art fully convolutional object contour
detector for seed-based instance segmentation by introducing the notion of
edge-mask duality with a novel patch-free and contour-oriented loss function.
Second, we train one model using only synthetic scenes, instead of manually
labeled training data. Our experimental results show that considering edge-mask
duality for training an encoder-decoder network, as we suggest, outperforms a
state-of-the-art patch-based network in the present application context.Comment: This is a pre-print of an article published in Human Friendly
Robotics, 10th International Workshop, Springer Proceedings in Advanced
Robotics, vol 7. The final authenticated version is available online at:
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89327-3\_16, Springer Proceedings in
Advanced Robotics, Siciliano Bruno, Khatib Oussama, In press, Human Friendly
Robotics, 10th International Workshop,
Learning Robust Object Recognition Using Composed Scenes from Generative Models
Recurrent feedback connections in the mammalian visual system have been
hypothesized to play a role in synthesizing input in the theoretical framework
of analysis by synthesis. The comparison of internally synthesized
representation with that of the input provides a validation mechanism during
perceptual inference and learning. Inspired by these ideas, we proposed that
the synthesis machinery can compose new, unobserved images by imagination to
train the network itself so as to increase the robustness of the system in
novel scenarios. As a proof of concept, we investigated whether images composed
by imagination could help an object recognition system to deal with occlusion,
which is challenging for the current state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural
networks. We fine-tuned a network on images containing objects in various
occlusion scenarios, that are imagined or self-generated through a deep
generator network. Trained on imagined occluded scenarios under the object
persistence constraint, our network discovered more subtle and localized image
features that were neglected by the original network for object classification,
obtaining better separability of different object classes in the feature space.
This leads to significant improvement of object recognition under occlusion for
our network relative to the original network trained only on un-occluded
images. In addition to providing practical benefits in object recognition under
occlusion, this work demonstrates the use of self-generated composition of
visual scenes through the synthesis loop, combined with the object persistence
constraint, can provide opportunities for neural networks to discover new
relevant patterns in the data, and become more flexible in dealing with novel
situations.Comment: Accepted by 14th Conference on Computer and Robot Visio
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