Blog: A Clearer Picture of Vision

A Clearer Picture of Vision
MIT News (01/28/11) Larry Hardesty

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Ruth Rosenholtz recently presented a new mathematical model of how the brain summarizes the content of retinal images. The model can predict the visual system's failure on certain types of image-processing tasks, a sign that it captures some aspect of human cognition. Rosenholtz's model is designed to deal with the reduced accuracy of vision on the periphery, applying statistical formulas to "patchy" vision fields. It includes statistics on the orientation of features, feature size, brightness, and color. The new technique is very efficient, because it can store 1,000 statistics on each patch in the visual field, but with only one-90th as many virtual neurons as the brain would need to store the same amount of data. In testing, the degree of difference between the statistics of different patches is a good indicator of how quickly subjects can find a target object. Rosenholtz says the model is based on a group of statistics commonly used to describe visual data in computer vision research.

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