Evidence from Audition

Author(s):  
Dale Purves

The reason for using vision as an example in the previous three chapters is that more is known about the human visual system and visual psychophysics than about other neural systems. But this choice begs the question of whether other systems corroborate the evidence drawn from vision. Is the same empirical strategy used in other sensory systems to contend with the same problem (i.e., the inability of animals to measure the actual properties of the world)? Based on accumulated anatomical, physiological, and psychophysical information, audition is the best bet in addressing this question in another modality. This chapter examines whether the perception of sound can also be explained empirically as a way to deal with a world in which the physical parameters of sound sources can’t be apprehended.

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 529-541 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Ajina ◽  
Holly Bridge

Damage to the primary visual cortex removes the major input from the eyes to the brain, causing significant visual loss as patients are unable to perceive the side of the world contralateral to the damage. Some patients, however, retain the ability to detect visual information within this blind region; this is known as blindsight. By studying the visual pathways that underlie this residual vision in patients, we can uncover additional aspects of the human visual system that likely contribute to normal visual function but cannot be revealed under physiological conditions. In this review, we discuss the residual abilities and neural activity that have been described in blindsight and the implications of these findings for understanding the intact system.


Algorithms ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Malowany ◽  
Hugo Guterman

Computer vision is currently one of the most exciting and rapidly evolving fields of science, which affects numerous industries. Research and development breakthroughs, mainly in the field of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), opened the way to unprecedented sensitivity and precision in object detection and recognition tasks. Nevertheless, the findings in recent years on the sensitivity of neural networks to additive noise, light conditions, and to the wholeness of the training dataset, indicate that this technology still lacks the robustness needed for the autonomous robotic industry. In an attempt to bring computer vision algorithms closer to the capabilities of a human operator, the mechanisms of the human visual system was analyzed in this work. Recent studies show that the mechanisms behind the recognition process in the human brain include continuous generation of predictions based on prior knowledge of the world. These predictions enable rapid generation of contextual hypotheses that bias the outcome of the recognition process. This mechanism is especially advantageous in situations of uncertainty, when visual input is ambiguous. In addition, the human visual system continuously updates its knowledge about the world based on the gaps between its prediction and the visual feedback. CNNs are feed forward in nature and lack such top-down contextual attenuation mechanisms. As a result, although they process massive amounts of visual information during their operation, the information is not transformed into knowledge that can be used to generate contextual predictions and improve their performance. In this work, an architecture was designed that aims to integrate the concepts behind the top-down prediction and learning processes of the human visual system with the state-of-the-art bottom-up object recognition models, e.g., deep CNNs. The work focuses on two mechanisms of the human visual system: anticipation-driven perception and reinforcement-driven learning. Imitating these top-down mechanisms, together with the state-of-the-art bottom-up feed-forward algorithms, resulted in an accurate, robust, and continuously improving target recognition model.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-64
Author(s):  
Altynay Kadyrova ◽  
Majid Ansari-Asl ◽  
Eva Maria Valero Benito

Colour is one of the most important appearance attributes in a variety of fields including both science and industry. The focus of this work is on cosmetics field and specifically on the performance of the human visual system on the selection of foundation makeup colour that best matches with the human skin colour. In many cases, colour evaluations tend to be subjective and vary from person to person thereby producing challenging problems to quantify colour for objective evaluations and measurements. Although many researches have been done on colour quantification in last few decades, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate objectively a consumer's visual system in skin colour matching through a psychophysical experiment under different illuminations exploiting spectral measurements. In this paper, the experiment setup is discussed and the results from the experiment are presented. The correlation between observers' skin colour evaluations by using PANTONE Skin Tone Guide samples and spectroradiometer is assessed. Moreover, inter and intra observer variability are considered and commented. The results reveal differences between nine ethnic groups, between two genders, and between the measurements under two illuminants (i.e.D65 and F (fluorescent)). The results further show that skin colour assessment was done better under D65 than under F illuminant. The human visual system was three times worse than instrument in colour matching in terms of colour difference between skin and PANTONE Skin Tone Guide samples. The observers tend to choose lighter, less reddish, and consequently paler colours as the best match to their skin colour. These results have practical applications. They can be used to design, for example, an application for foundation colour selection based on correlation between colour measurements and human visual system based subjective evaluations.


2012 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-152
Author(s):  
Michal Mardiak ◽  
Jaroslav Polec

Objective Video Quality Method Based on Mutual Information and Human Visual SystemIn this paper we present the objective video quality metric based on mutual information and Human Visual System. The calculation of proposed metric consists of two stages. In the first stage of quality evaluation whole original and test sequence are pre-processed by the Human Visual System. In the second stage we calculate mutual information which has been utilized as the quality evaluation criteria. The mutual information was calculated between the frame from original sequence and the corresponding frame from test sequence. For this testing purpose we choose Foreman video at CIF resolution. To prove reliability of our metric were compared it with some commonly used objective methods for measuring the video quality. The results show that presented objective video quality metric based on mutual information and Human Visual System provides relevant results in comparison with results of other objective methods so it is suitable candidate for measuring the video quality.


Author(s):  
Wen-Han Zhu ◽  
Wei Sun ◽  
Xiong-Kuo Min ◽  
Guang-Tao Zhai ◽  
Xiao-Kang Yang

AbstractObjective image quality assessment (IQA) plays an important role in various visual communication systems, which can automatically and efficiently predict the perceived quality of images. The human eye is the ultimate evaluator for visual experience, thus the modeling of human visual system (HVS) is a core issue for objective IQA and visual experience optimization. The traditional model based on black box fitting has low interpretability and it is difficult to guide the experience optimization effectively, while the model based on physiological simulation is hard to integrate into practical visual communication services due to its high computational complexity. For bridging the gap between signal distortion and visual experience, in this paper, we propose a novel perceptual no-reference (NR) IQA algorithm based on structural computational modeling of HVS. According to the mechanism of the human brain, we divide the visual signal processing into a low-level visual layer, a middle-level visual layer and a high-level visual layer, which conduct pixel information processing, primitive information processing and global image information processing, respectively. The natural scene statistics (NSS) based features, deep features and free-energy based features are extracted from these three layers. The support vector regression (SVR) is employed to aggregate features to the final quality prediction. Extensive experimental comparisons on three widely used benchmark IQA databases (LIVE, CSIQ and TID2013) demonstrate that our proposed metric is highly competitive with or outperforms the state-of-the-art NR IQA measures.


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