Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 10 (NIPS 1997)
Laurent Itti, Jochen Braun, Dale Lee, Christof Koch
We propose a model for early visual processing in primates. The model consists of a population of linear spatial filters which inter(cid:173) act through non-linear excitatory and inhibitory pooling. Statisti(cid:173) cal estimation theory is then used to derive human psychophysical thresholds from the responses of the entire population of units. The model is able to reproduce human thresholds for contrast and ori(cid:173) entation discrimination tasks, and to predict contrast thresholds in the presence of masks of varying orientation and spatial frequency.