Discrimination of Changes in the Slopes of the Amplitude Spectra of Natural Images: Band-Limited Contrast and Psychometric Functions

Perception ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 26 (8) ◽  
pp. 1011-1025 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J Tolhurst ◽  
Yoav Tadmor
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Frequency ◽  
Discrimination Task ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Natural Images ◽  
Natural Scenes ◽  
Local Contrast ◽  
Frequency Bands ◽  
Amplitude Spectra ◽  
Lower Frequency Band ◽  
Band Limited

Thresholds were measured for discriminating changes in the slopes of the amplitude spectra of stimuli derived from photographs of natural scenes and from random-luminance patterns. The variety and magnitudes of the thresholds could be explained by a model based on the discrimination of the changes in band-limited local contrast. Different spatial scales of local contrast (or different spatial-frequency bands of about 1 octave) were implicated for different reference spectral slopes; the model implicated a lower frequency-band for stimuli with shallower amplitude spectra. The implications of the model were tested experimentally by using stimuli in which the spectra were changed within restricted spatial-frequency bands. When the amplitude spectra of the test and reference stimuli differed only within the implicated frequency bands, thresholds were affected little. However, when the test and reference spectra differed at all frequencies except those in the implicated bands, the thresholds were elevated markedly. The forms of the psychometric functions for the discrimination task were entirely compatible with the hypothesis that the task relies upon the ability to discriminate changes of contrast. The Weibull functions fitted to the data had slope parameters (β) in the range 1 to 3, compatible with discrimination of low (but suprathreshold) contrasts.

scholarly journals Two frequency bands contain the most stimulus-related information in visual cortex

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher M. Lewis ◽  
Conrado A. Bosman ◽  
Nicolas M. Brunet ◽  
Bruss Lima ◽  
Mark J. Roberts ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Single Cells ◽  
Field Potential ◽  
Oscillatory Activity ◽  
Natural Scenes ◽  
Beta Band ◽  
Frequency Bands ◽  
Related Information ◽  
Cortical Oscillations

AbstractSensory cortices represent the world through the activity of diversely tuned cells. How the activity of single cells is coordinated within populations and across sensory hierarchies is largely unknown. Cortical oscillations may coordinate local and distributed neuronal groups. Using datasets from intracortical multi-electrode recordings and from large-scale electrocorticography (ECoG) grids, we investigated how visual features could be extracted from the local field potential (LFP) and how this compared with the information available from multi-unit activity (MUA). MUA recorded from macaque V1 contained comparable amounts of information as simultaneously recorded LFP power in two frequency bands, one in the alpha-beta band and the other in the gamma band. ECoG-LFP contained information in the same bands as microelectrode-LFP, even when identifying natural scenes. The fact that information was contained in the same bands in both intracortical and ECoG recordings suggests that oscillatory activity could play similar roles at both spatial scales.

scholarly journals On measuring the local perceived blur in natural scenes both in the lab and online

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Patrick Taylor ◽  
Peter J. Bex
Keyword(s):  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Natural Images ◽  
Amazon Mechanical Turk ◽  
Retinal Images ◽  
Natural Scenes ◽  
Local Slope ◽  
Image Blur ◽  
Band Limited ◽  
Local Image ◽  
Good Agreement

Natural retinal images contain blur. Image blur varies across the visual field depending on the three dimensional image structure and the observers’ point of accommodation. There is currently no consensus in the field on how to quantify local perceived blur in natural images. We developed a biologically-plausible measure of local image blur, local slope, which is computed from the output of a set spatial frequency and orientation band-limited filters. To determine if local slope captured the perception of image blur variation, we used a task in which observers traced regions in natural images that matched the perceived blur of a standard blur. We ran our tracing task both under controlled laboratory conditionswith a small number of observers and online using a large sample of Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers. There was good agreement across observes on image regions with matched perceived blur and a correlation between local slopes of blur-matching areas of natural and standard images for data collected in the lab and online. These data indicate that local slope may provide a rapid and simple metric of perceived blur in natural scenes for human observers.

Local Contrast in Natural Images: Normalisation and Coding Efficiency

Perception ◽  
10.1068/p2996 ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 29 (9) ◽  
pp. 1041-1055 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nuala Brady ◽  
David J Field
Keyword(s):  
Natural Images ◽  
Local Contrast ◽  
Coding Efficiency

scholarly journals Measuring Streetscape Complexity Based on the Statistics of Local Contrast and Spatial Frequency

PLoS ONE ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. e87097 ◽  
Author(s):  
André Cavalcante ◽  
Ahmed Mansouri ◽  
Lemya Kacha ◽  
Allan Kardec Barros ◽  
Yoshinori Takeuchi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Frequency ◽  
Local Contrast

scholarly journals Human estimation of local contrast orientation in natural images

2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (8) ◽  
pp. 1048-1048
Author(s):  
G. Hoff ◽  
M. Brady
Keyword(s):  
Natural Images ◽  
Local Contrast ◽  
Human Estimation

Independent Processing across Spatial Frequency in Moving Broadband Patterns

Perception ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 26 (8) ◽  
pp. 961-976 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A Eagle
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Frequency ◽  
Visual System ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Power Spectra ◽  
Frequency Noise ◽  
Low Contrast ◽  
Task Requirements ◽  
Noise Frequency ◽  
Frame Motion

The aim of the experiments was to discover whether the visual system has independent access to motion information at different spatial scales when presented with a broadband stimulus. Subjects were required to discriminate between a pair of two-frame motion sequences, one containing a coherently displacing pattern and the other containing a pattern with high-frequency noise. The stimuli were either narrowband (1 octave) or broadband (6 octaves spanning 0.23–15.0 cycles deg−1) and their power spectra were either flat or followed a 1 /f2 function. For the broadband stimuli, noise was introduced cumulatively into increasingly lower frequencies. For the narrowband stimuli, noise was introduced into the same frequency band as the signal. All stimuli could be defined by the lowest noise frequency ( n1) they contained. For each stimulus, the largest spatial displacement across the two frames at which the task could be performed was measured ( dmax). For the narrowband stimuli, dmax increased as n1 was lowered. This was true over the entire frequency range for the 1 /f2 stimuli, though the task became impossible for the flat-spectrum stimuli at the lowest frequencies. This is attributed to the very low contrast of these latter stimuli. The dmax values for the broadband stimuli tended to shadow those of the narrowband stimuli with the equivalent values of n1 being around 25% lower. The data were modelled by spatiotemporally filtering the stimuli and considering the amount of directional power in the signal and noise sequences. The results suggest that there must be multiple spatial-frequency channels in operation, and that for broadband patterns the visual system has perceptual access to these individual channel outputs, utilising different filters depending on the task requirements.

Temporal-Discontinuity Detection with Contrast-Modulated Gratings

Perception ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 24 (11) ◽  
pp. 1257-1264
Author(s):  
Shigeru Ichihara ◽  
Kenji Susami
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Frequency ◽  
Modulation Frequency ◽  
Sinusoidal Grating ◽  
Local Contrast ◽  
Staircase Method ◽  
Low Contrast ◽  
Discontinuity Detection ◽  
Temporal Discontinuity ◽  
Sinusoidal Gratings ◽  
The Subject

Three experiments on temporal-discontinuity detection were carried out. In experiment 1, temporal-discontinuity thresholds were measured for sinusoidal gratings by the use of the double-staircase method. A sinusoidal grating was presented twice successively. The subject judged whether or not an interval was present. The temporal-discontinuity threshold increased as the spatial frequency of the grating increased, but decreased as the contrast of the grating increased. In experiment 2, contrast-modulated gratings were used instead of the sinusoidal grating. The temporal-discontinuity threshold increased as the carrier frequency increased, and the threshold for each contrast-modulated grating was similar to that for the no-modulation (sinusoidal) grating whose contrast was the same as the maximum local contrast of the contrast-modulated grating. In experiment 3, temporal-discontinuity thresholds were measured for low-contrast (3%) sinusoidal gratings. The thresholds were very low, even for such low-contrast gratings. These results suggest that the low-spatial-frequency channels are not involved in detecting the modulation frequency of the contrast-modulated grating. Rather, the local contrast seems to be the determinant of the detection of the contrast-modulated grating itself.

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