The Statistical Properties of Local Log-Contrast in Natural Images

Abstract. The study of natural image statistics considers the statistical properties of large collections of images from natural scenes, and has applications in image processing, computer vision, and visual computational neuroscience. In the past, a major focus in the field of natural image statistics have been the statistics of outputs of linear filters. Recently, attention has been turning to nonlinear models. The contribution of this paper is the empirical analysis of the statistical properties of a central nonlinear property of natural scenes: the local log-contrast. To this end, we have studied both second-order and higher-order statistics of local log-contrast. Second-order statistics can be observed from the average amplitude spectrum. To examine higher-order statistics, we applied a higher-order-statistics-based model called independent component analysis to images of local log-contrast. Our results on second-order statistics show that the local log-contrast has a power-law-l...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: SCIA
• Authors: Jussi T. Lindgren, Jarmo Hurri, Aapo Hyvärinen
• Keywords: Local Log-contrast, Natural Image, Natural Image Statistics, SCIA 2007