Dynamic decorrelation as a unifying principle for explaining a broad range of brightness phenomena.

The visual system is highly sensitive to spatial context for encoding luminance patterns. Context sensitivity inspired the proposal of many neural mechanisms for explaining the perception of luminance (brightness). Here we propose a novel computational model for estimating the brightness of many vis...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Alejandro Lerer, Hans Supèr, Matthias S Keil
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2021-04-01
Series:PLoS Computational Biology
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007907
Description
Summary:The visual system is highly sensitive to spatial context for encoding luminance patterns. Context sensitivity inspired the proposal of many neural mechanisms for explaining the perception of luminance (brightness). Here we propose a novel computational model for estimating the brightness of many visual illusions. We hypothesize that many aspects of brightness can be explained by a dynamic filtering process that reduces the redundancy in edge representations on the one hand, while non-redundant activity is enhanced on the other. The dynamic filter is learned for each input image and implements context sensitivity. Dynamic filtering is applied to the responses of (model) complex cells in order to build a gain control map. The gain control map then acts on simple cell responses before they are used to create a brightness map via activity propagation. Our approach is successful in predicting many challenging visual illusions, including contrast effects, assimilation, and reverse contrast with the same set of model parameters.
ISSN:1553-734X
1553-7358