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NJIT Mathematical Biology Seminar

Tuesday, February 5, 2008, 4:00pm
Cullimore Hall 611
New Jersey Institute of Technology

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Natural image statistics and contextual visual processing

Odelia Schwartz

Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Contextual stimuli exert a dramatic influence on neural processing and perception. We focus on contextual surround and orientation as a paradigmatic example. We discuss contextual effects in terms of a generative probabilistic model of natural image statistics known as the Gaussian Scale Mixture model, which is related to divisive gain control in cortical models. For this class of model, one can learn patterns of dependence between oriented filter responses for a given image ensemble. We discuss preliminary work linking this form of model, through population decoding, to the tilt illusion.