Identification of Salient Contours in Cluttered Images

Shih-Cheng Yen and Leif H. Finkel

Department of Bioengineering and
Institute of Neurological Sciences
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104, U. S. A.

Abstract

We present a model of contour extraction in which the perceptual salience of contours arises from long-range interactions between orientation-selective filters. Ullman, Zucker and colleagues have previously shown that salient contours may be extracted from noisy images by using a number of heuristic features. Our algorithm is based on cortical mechanisms, and simulations show close agreement with results from recent anatomical, physiological and psychophysical studies including recent results of Field et al., Kovács et al., and Kapadia et al.. The performance of the algorithm is demonstrated on a range of psychophysical stimuli and real images.

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