12 research outputs found
Information Presentation: Human Research Program - Space Human Factors and Habitability, Space Human Factors Engineering Project
The goal of the Information Presentation Directed Research Project (DRP) is to address design questions related to the presentation of information to the crew. The major areas of work, or subtasks, within this DRP are: 1) Displays, 2) Controls, 3) Electronic Procedures and Fault Management, and 4) Human Performance Modeling. This DRP is a collaborative effort between researchers atJohnson Space Center and Ames Research Center.
Object Detection Through Exploration With A Foveated Visual Field
We present a foveated object detector (FOD) as a biologically-inspired
alternative to the sliding window (SW) approach which is the dominant method of
search in computer vision object detection. Similar to the human visual system,
the FOD has higher resolution at the fovea and lower resolution at the visual
periphery. Consequently, more computational resources are allocated at the
fovea and relatively fewer at the periphery. The FOD processes the entire
scene, uses retino-specific object detection classifiers to guide eye
movements, aligns its fovea with regions of interest in the input image and
integrates observations across multiple fixations. Our approach combines modern
object detectors from computer vision with a recent model of peripheral pooling
regions found at the V1 layer of the human visual system. We assessed various
eye movement strategies on the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset and show that the FOD
performs on par with the SW detector while bringing significant computational
cost savings.Comment: An extended version of this manuscript was published in PLOS
Computational Biology (October 2017) at
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.100574
The time course of visual information accrual guiding eye movement decisions
Saccadic eye movements are the result of neural decisions about where to move the eyes. These decisions are based on visual information accumulated before the saccade; however, during an ≈100-ms interval immediately before the initiation of an eye movement, new visual information cannot influence the decision. Does the brain simply ignore information presented during this brief interval or is the information used for the subsequent saccade? Our study examines how and when the brain integrates visual information through time to drive saccades during visual search. We introduce a new technique, saccade-contingent reverse correlation, that measures the time course of visual information accrual driving the first and second saccades. Observers searched for a contrast-defined target among distractors. Independent contrast noise was added to the target and distractors every 25 ms. Only noise presented in the time interval in which the brain accumulates information will influence the saccadic decisions. Therefore, we can retrieve the time course of saccadic information accrual by averaging the time course of the noise, aligned to saccade initiation, across all trials with saccades to distractors. Results show that before the first saccade, visual information is being accumulated simultaneously for the first and second saccades. Furthermore, information presented immediately before the first saccade is not used in making the first saccadic decision but instead is stored and used by the neural processes driving the second saccade