Seminario del 2017

2017
19 maggio
Silvio Sabatini
nell'ambito della serie: NEUROMATEMATICA
Seminario interdisciplinare
Enabling visually-guided behaviors in artificial agents implies picking-up and organizing appropriate information from the visual signal at multiple levels. The question arises about how to carefully define which feature to extract, or, from a different perspective, which kind of representation to adopt for the visual signal itself. It is well known that receptive fields (RFs) in the early stages of the primary visual cortex behave as band-pass linear filters performing a multichannel representation of the visual signal (cf. the Gabor jets). Typically, visual features are direcly derived, as symbols, from the outputs of such front-end RFs. Here, I want to emphasize the advantages of thinking early visual processes in terms of signal processing, pointing out the key role played by a full harmonic representation of the visual signal and how highly informative properties of the visual signal are efficiently and effectively embedded in the local image phases and their relationships. Accordingly, instead of directly extracting "classic" spatial features (such as edges, corners, etc.) and then looking for correspondences, we can follow a complementary approach: the visual signal is described in frequency bandwidths in terms of local amplitude, phase and orientation, and more complex visual features are derived as "qualities" based on local phase properties e.g., such as phase conguency, phase difference, and phase constancy, for contrast transitions, disparity and motion, respectively. Notably, phase-based interpretation of the visual signal allows direct links between consolidated machine vision computational techniques and the ascertained properties of visual cortical cells. The issue of direct phase-based measurements vs. distributed population coding of visual features will be discussed in relations to motion and stereo perceptual tasks.

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