Title
Extraction of salient contours from cluttered scenes
Abstract
The responses of neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1) to stimulus inside the receptive field (RF) can be markedly modulated by stimuli outside the classical receptive field. The modulation, relying on contextual configurations, yields excitatory and inhibitory activities. The V1 neurons compose a functional network by lateral interactions and accomplish specific visual tasks in a dynamic and flexible fashion. Well-organized structures and conspicuous image locations are more salient and thus can pop out perceptually from the background. The excitatory and inhibitory activities give different visual physiological interpretations to the two kinds of saliencies. A model of contour extraction, inspired by visual cortical mechanisms of perceptual grouping, is presented. We unify the dual processes of spatial facilitation and surround inhibition to extract salient contours from complex scenes, and in this way coherent spatial configurations and region boundaries could stand out from their surround. The proposed method can selectively retain object contours, and meanwhile can dramatically reduce non-meaningful elements resulting from a texture background. This work gives a clear understanding for the roles of the inhibition and facilitation in grouping, and provides a biologically motivated computational strategy for contour extraction in computer vision.
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1016/j.patcog.2007.02.009
Pattern Recognition
Keywords
Field
DocType
object contour,cluttered scene,classical receptive field,different visual physiological interpretation,salient contour,inhibitory activity,v1 neuron,primary visual cortex,contour extraction,specific visual task,coherent spatial configuration,visual cortical mechanism,saliency,computer vision,receptive field
Receptive field,Computer vision,Surround suppression,Visual cortex,Pattern recognition,Edge detection,Salience (neuroscience),Artificial intelligence,Stimulus (physiology),Perception,Mathematics,Salient
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
40
11
Pattern Recognition
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
27
1.09
15
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Qiling Tang1554.23
Nong Sang247572.22
Tianxu Zhang320623.18