Change blindness: eradication of gestalt strategies

Arrays of eight, texture-defined rectangles were used as stimuli in a one-shot change blindness (CB) task where there was a 50% chance that one rectangle would change orientation between two successive presentations separated by an interval. CB was eliminated by cueing the target rectangle in the first stimulus, reduced by cueing in the interval and unaffected by cueing in the second presentation. This supports the idea that a representation was formed that persisted through the interval before being 'overwritten' by the second presentation (Landman et al, 2003 Vision Research 43149–164]. Another possibility is that participants used some kind of grouping or Gestalt strategy. To test this we changed the spatial position of the rectangles in the second presentation by shifting them along imaginary spokes (by ±1 degree) emanating from the central fixation point. There was no significant difference seen in performance between this and the standard task [F(1,4)=2.565, p=0.185]. This may suggest two things: (i) Gestalt grouping is not used as a strategy in these tasks, and (ii) it gives further weight to the argument that objects may be stored and retrieved from a pre-attentional store during this task

Visual and eye movement functions of the posterior parietal cortex

Lesions of the posterior parietal area in humans produce interesting spatial-perceptual and spatial-behavioral deficits. Among the more important deficits observed are loss of spatial memories, problems representing spatial relations in models or drawings, disturbances in the spatial distribution of attention, and the inability to localize visual targets. Posterior parietal lesions in nonhuman primates also produce visual spatial deficits not unlike those found in humans. Mountcastle and his colleagues were the first to explore this area, using single cell recording techniques in behaving monkeys over 13 years ago. Subsequent work by Mountcastle, Lynch and colleagues, Hyvarinen and colleagues, Robinson, Goldberg & Stanton, and Sakata and colleagues during the period of the late 1970s and early 1980s provided an informational and conceptual foundation for exploration of this fascinating area of the brain. Four new directions of research that are presently being explored from this foundation are reviewed in this article. 1. The anatomical and functional organization of the inferior parietal lobule is presently being investigated with neuroanatomical tracing and single cell recording techniques. This area is now known to be comprised of at least four separate cortical fields. 2. Neural mechanisms for spatial constancy are being explored. In area 7a information about eye position is found to be integrated with visual inputs to produce representations of visual space that are head-centered (the meaning of a head-centered coordinate system is explained on p. 13). 3. The role of the posterior parietal cortex, and the pathways projecting into this region, in processing information about motion in the visual world is under investigation. Visual areas within the posterior parietal cortex may play a role in extracting higher level motion information including the perception of structure-from-motion. 4. A previously unexplored area within the intraparietal sulcus has been found whose cells hold a representation in memory of planned eye movements. Special experimental protocols have shown that these cells code the direction and amplitude of intended movements in motor coordinates and suggest that this area plays a role in motor planning

Unobtrusive and pervasive video-based eye-gaze tracking

Eye-gaze tracking has long been considered a desktop technology that finds its use inside the traditional office setting, where the operating conditions may be controlled. Nonetheless, recent advancements in mobile technology and a growing interest in capturing natural human behaviour have motivated an emerging interest in tracking eye movements within unconstrained real-life conditions, referred to as pervasive eye-gaze tracking. This critical review focuses on emerging passive and unobtrusive video-based eye-gaze tracking methods in recent literature, with the aim to identify different research avenues that are being followed in response to the challenges of pervasive eye-gaze tracking. Different eye-gaze tracking approaches are discussed in order to bring out their strengths and weaknesses, and to identify any limitations, within the context of pervasive eye-gaze tracking, that have yet to be considered by the computer vision community.peer-reviewe

Fast Landmark Localization with 3D Component Reconstruction and CNN for Cross-Pose Recognition

Two approaches are proposed for cross-pose face recognition, one is based on the 3D reconstruction of facial components and the other is based on the deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Unlike most 3D approaches that consider holistic faces, the proposed approach considers 3D facial components. It segments a 2D gallery face into components, reconstructs the 3D surface for each component, and recognizes a probe face by component features. The segmentation is based on the landmarks located by a hierarchical algorithm that combines the Faster R-CNN for face detection and the Reduced Tree Structured Model for landmark localization. The core part of the CNN-based approach is a revised VGG network. We study the performances with different settings on the training set, including the synthesized data from 3D reconstruction, the real-life data from an in-the-wild database, and both types of data combined. We investigate the performances of the network when it is employed as a classifier or designed as a feature extractor. The two recognition approaches and the fast landmark localization are evaluated in extensive experiments, and compared to stateof-the-art methods to demonstrate their efficacy.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures, 4 table