Band-limited contrast in natural images explains the detectability of changes in the amplitude spectra

Vision Research
D J Tolhurst, Y Tadmor

Abstract

The psychophysical task of discriminating changes in the slopes of the amplitude spectra of complex images has been used in the past to test whether the human visual system might be optimised for coding the spatial structure in natural images (e.g. Knill et al., 1990; Tadmor & Tolhurst, 1994). We have reported that the dependency of these discrimination thresholds on the reference slope has the same overall general form, regardless of the particular digitised photographs that are used for generating the stimuli. The actual discrimination thresholds, however, differ markedly in magnitude for stimuli that are derived from different digitised photographs. Here, we describe a model that aims at explaining this diversity of threshold magnitudes: we suppose that the observer is detecting small changes in image contrast estimated within limited spatial-frequency bands of about 1 octave bandwidth. This local-contrast analysis reveals that contrast changes in only one frequency band are of comparable magnitudes to the changes that observers need for detecting differences in the Michelson contrast of simple sinusoidal gratings. The success of this band-limited contrast model is further shown in experiments where the slopes of the amplitu...Continue Reading

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Citations

Mar 18, 2009·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Daniel H Baker, Erich W Graf
Mar 1, 2000·Network : Computation in Neural Systems·P Reinagel, A M Zador
Aug 27, 2003·Network : Computation in Neural Systems·Bruce C HansenJ Kevin DeFord
Apr 3, 2010·PloS One·Satohiro Tajima, Masato Okada
Oct 27, 2015·Ophthalmic & Physiological Optics : the Journal of the British College of Ophthalmic Opticians (Optometrists)·David J Tolhurst
Oct 7, 2015·Frontiers in Human Neuroscience·Branka SpeharRichard P Taylor
Jan 31, 2004·Vision Research·Cheryl A OlmanDaniel Kersten
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Feb 8, 2007·Perception·Vicente Sierra-VázquezDolores Luna
Jan 9, 2019·Documenta Ophthalmologica. Advances in Ophthalmology·Railson Cruz SalomãoGivago Silva Souza
Jul 19, 2003·Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, Image Science, and Vision·Richard F MurrayLeland S Stone
May 18, 2019·Journal of Vision·Bruno RichardPatrick Shafto
Apr 21, 2005·Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, Image Science, and Vision·Yury Petrov

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