Vision is an excellent example of the rich interplay between computational and biological approaches to the understanding of complex information processing tasks. Studies of biological solutions to the computational problems of vision, such as contrast masking, movement detection, orientation selectivity has created many controversies in visual neuroscience. Recent neurobiological findings suggest an experimental paradigm that gives emphasis to strategies, which rely on the combined activities of cells or cell assembly for information transforms. This new perspective explains an integrated synaptic facilitation that is contingent upon the emergent spatial and temporal properties of cell activities. The paper briefly presents a novel biologically inspired adaptive architecture that can serve for analysis of cell response dynamics to encode analog visual sensory data under varying conditions. The key will be the active representation of visual objects temporal characteristics, i.e., the exposures time and the syntactic structure to achieve invariance for the fundamental problems of scene segmentation and figure-ground separation. The basic neural mechanism is that of plastic relationship between and within participating cells or cellular groups with known receptive field organizations. Our system behavior is tested with numerous parametric psychophysical data, and the selected simulation samples predict: Only the active integration from multiple exposure to the sequence of sensory visual information can yield a reliable encode to extract salient features of visual objects, in partially unknown and possibly changing environments.

Date Published: 12 March 1999
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 3719, Sensor Fusion: Architectures, Algorithms, and Applications III, (12 March 1999); doi: 10.1117/12.341331

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 3719:
Sensor Fusion: Architectures, Algorithms, and Applications III
Belur V. Dasarathy, Editor(s)