In 1992 neurophysiologists [5] found an new type of cells in areas V1 and V2 of the monkey primary visual cortex, which they called grating cells. These cells respond vigorously to a grating pattern of appropriate orientation and periodicity. A few years later a computational model inspired by these findings was published [3]. The study of this paper is to model a grating cell operator that responds in a very similar way as these grating cells do. Three different databases containing a total of 338 real world images of textures were applied to the operator. Based on these images, our findings were that grating cells respond best to repetitive alternating patterns of a specific orientation. These patterns are mostly human made structures, like buildings, fabrics, and tiles.
Tino Lourens, Kazuhiro Nakadai, Hiroshi G. Okuno,