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Multi-scale contour detection model based on fixational eye movement mechanism

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Abstract

Physiological evidence has shown that classical receptive field (CRF) responses in the primary visual cortex (V1) can be suppressed by its surrounding region, called the non-classical receptive field (nCRF). Currently, the contour detection model based on the physiological characteristics of the V1 region is mainly used to suppress texture and highlight contour information through the inhibition of nCRF features. However, the effect of eye movement on inhibition is not considered in the inhibition calculation of such models. Inspired by the fixational eye movement (FEyeM) mechanism, we propose a multi-scale contour detection model based on fixational eye movement (MsFem) and the surrounding suppression mechanism. A bank of filters was proposed to simulate the influence of FEyeMs on nCRF, and multi-scale cues were utilized to improve the fine and coarse contour extraction and texture inhibition. The experiments showed that MsFem outperformed some biologically motivated ones in retaining the small-scale target contour information and suppressing the large-scale background textures.

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Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments on an earlier draft of this paper. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61866002), the Guangxi Natural Science Foundation (Grant Nos. 2018GXNSFAA138122 and 2015GXNSFAA139293), the Innovation Project of Guangxi Graduate Education (Grant No. YCSW2018203), and the Innovation Project of GuangXi University of Science and Technology Graduate Education (Grant Nos. GKYC201706 and GKYC201803). The funders had no role in the study design the collection, analysis, interpretation of data, writing of the report, or the decision to submit the article for publication.

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  1. College of Electric and Information Engineering, Guangxi University of Science and Technology, Liuzhou, 545006, China

    Chuan Lin, Qing Zhang & Yijun Cao

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  1. Chuan Lin
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  2. Qing Zhang
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  3. Yijun Cao
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Correspondence to Chuan Lin.

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Lin, C., Zhang, Q. & Cao, Y. Multi-scale contour detection model based on fixational eye movement mechanism. SIViP 14, 57–65 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-019-01524-2

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