7 research outputs found
Bioplausible multiscale filtering in retino-cortical processing as a mechanism in perceptual grouping
Why does our visual system fail to reconstruct reality, when we look at
certain patterns? Where do Geometrical illusions start to emerge in the visual
pathway? How far should we take computational models of vision with the same
visual ability to detect illusions as we do? This study addresses these
questions, by focusing on a specific underlying neural mechanism involved in
our visual experiences that affects our final perception. Among many types of
visual illusion, Geometrical and, in particular, Tilt Illusions are rather
important, being characterized by misperception of geometric patterns involving
lines and tiles in combination with contrasting orientation, size or position.
Over the last decade, many new neurophysiological experiments have led to new
insights as to how, when and where retinal processing takes place, and the
encoding nature of the retinal representation that is sent to the cortex for
further processing. Based on these neurobiological discoveries, we provide
computer simulation evidence from modelling retinal ganglion cells responses to
some complex Tilt Illusions, suggesting that the emergence of tilt in these
illusions is partially related to the interaction of multiscale visual
processing performed in the retina. The output of our low-level filtering model
is presented for several types of Tilt Illusion, predicting that the final tilt
percept arises from multiple-scale processing of the Differences of Gaussians
and the perceptual interaction of foreground and background elements. Our
results suggest that this model has a high potential in revealing the
underlying mechanism connecting low-level filtering approaches to mid- and
high-level explanations such as Anchoring theory and Perceptual grouping.Comment: 23 pages, 8 figures, Brain Informatics journal: Full text access:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40708-017-0072-
The Café Wall Illusion: Local and Global Perception from Multiple Scales to Multiscale
Copyright © 2017 Nasim Nematzadeh and David M. W. Powers. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Geometrical illusions are a subclass of optical illusions in which the geometrical characteristics of patterns in particular orientations and angles are distorted and misperceived as a result of low-to-high-level retinal/cortical processing. Modelling the detection of tilt in these illusions, and its strength, is a challenging task and leads to the development of techniques that explain important features of human perception. We present here a predictive and quantitative approach for modelling foveal and peripheral vision for the induced tilt in the Café Wall illusion, in which parallel mortar lines between shifted rows of black and white tiles appear to converge and diverge. Difference of Gaussians is used to define a bioderived filtering model for the responses of retinal simple cells to the stimulus, while an analytical processing pipeline is developed to quantify the angle of tilt in the model and develop confidence intervals around them. Several sampling sizes and aspect ratios are explored to model variant foveal views, and a variety of pattern configurations are tested to model variant Gestalt views. The analysis of our model across this range of test configurations presents a precisely quantified comparison contrasting local tilt detection in the foveal sample sets with pattern-wide Gestalt tilt