Salience in Orientation-Filter Response Measured as Suspicious Coincidence in Natural Images

Visual cortex neurons have receptive fields resembling oriented bandpass filters, and their response distributions on natural images are non-Gaussian. Inspired by this, we previously showed that comparing the response distribution to normal distribution with the same variance gives a good thresholding criterion for detecting salient levels of edginess in images. However, (1) the results were based on comparison with human data, thus, an objective, quantitative performance measure was not taken. Furthermore, (2) why a normal distribution would serve as a good baseline was not investigated in full. In this paper, we first conduct a quantitative analysis of the normal-distribution baseline, using artificial images that closely mimic the statistics of natural images. Since in these artificial images, we can control and obtain the exact saliency information, the performance of the thresholding algorithm can be measured objectively. We then interpret the issue of the normal distribution bei...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Subramonia Sarma, Yoonsuck Choe
• Keywords: AAAI 2006, Intelligent Agents, Natural Images, Normal Distributions, Response Distribution