6,915 research outputs found
Motion clouds: model-based stimulus synthesis of natural-like random textures for the study of motion perception
Choosing an appropriate set of stimuli is essential to characterize the
response of a sensory system to a particular functional dimension, such as the
eye movement following the motion of a visual scene. Here, we describe a
framework to generate random texture movies with controlled information
content, i.e., Motion Clouds. These stimuli are defined using a generative
model that is based on controlled experimental parametrization. We show that
Motion Clouds correspond to dense mixing of localized moving gratings with
random positions. Their global envelope is similar to natural-like stimulation
with an approximate full-field translation corresponding to a retinal slip. We
describe the construction of these stimuli mathematically and propose an
open-source Python-based implementation. Examples of the use of this framework
are shown. We also propose extensions to other modalities such as color vision,
touch, and audition
A multi-scale, multi-wavelength source extraction method: getsources
We present a multi-scale, multi-wavelength source extraction algorithm called
getsources. Although it has been designed primarily for use in the far-infrared
surveys of Galactic star-forming regions with Herschel, the method can be
applied to many other astronomical images. Instead of the traditional approach
of extracting sources in the observed images, the new method analyzes fine
spatial decompositions of original images across a wide range of scales and
across all wavebands. It cleans those single-scale images of noise and
background, and constructs wavelength-independent single-scale detection images
that preserve information in both spatial and wavelength dimensions. Sources
are detected in the combined detection images by following the evolution of
their segmentation masks across all spatial scales. Measurements of the source
properties are done in the original background-subtracted images at each
wavelength; the background is estimated by interpolation under the source
footprints and overlapping sources are deblended in an iterative procedure. In
addition to the main catalog of sources, various catalogs and images are
produced that aid scientific exploitation of the extraction results. We
illustrate the performance of getsources on Herschel images by extracting
sources in sub-fields of the Aquila and Rosette star-forming regions. The
source extraction code and validation images with a reference extraction
catalog are freely available.Comment: 31 pages, 27 figures, to be published in Astronomy & Astrophysic
Biologically Inspired Dynamic Textures for Probing Motion Perception
Perception is often described as a predictive process based on an optimal
inference with respect to a generative model. We study here the principled
construction of a generative model specifically crafted to probe motion
perception. In that context, we first provide an axiomatic, biologically-driven
derivation of the model. This model synthesizes random dynamic textures which
are defined by stationary Gaussian distributions obtained by the random
aggregation of warped patterns. Importantly, we show that this model can
equivalently be described as a stochastic partial differential equation. Using
this characterization of motion in images, it allows us to recast motion-energy
models into a principled Bayesian inference framework. Finally, we apply these
textures in order to psychophysically probe speed perception in humans. In this
framework, while the likelihood is derived from the generative model, the prior
is estimated from the observed results and accounts for the perceptual bias in
a principled fashion.Comment: Twenty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing
Systems (NIPS), Dec 2015, Montreal, Canad
Dictionary Learning-based Inpainting on Triangular Meshes
The problem of inpainting consists of filling missing or damaged regions in
images and videos in such a way that the filling pattern does not produce
artifacts that deviate from the original data. In addition to restoring the
missing data, the inpainting technique can also be used to remove undesired
objects. In this work, we address the problem of inpainting on surfaces through
a new method based on dictionary learning and sparse coding. Our method learns
the dictionary through the subdivision of the mesh into patches and rebuilds
the mesh via a method of reconstruction inspired by the Non-local Means method
on the computed sparse codes. One of the advantages of our method is that it is
capable of filling the missing regions and simultaneously removes noise and
enhances important features of the mesh. Moreover, the inpainting result is
globally coherent as the representation based on the dictionaries captures all
the geometric information in the transformed domain. We present two variations
of the method: a direct one, in which the model is reconstructed and restored
directly from the representation in the transformed domain and a second one,
adaptive, in which the missing regions are recreated iteratively through the
successive propagation of the sparse code computed in the hole boundaries,
which guides the local reconstructions. The second method produces better
results for large regions because the sparse codes of the patches are adapted
according to the sparse codes of the boundary patches. Finally, we present and
analyze experimental results that demonstrate the performance of our method
compared to the literature
- …