Extraction of Salient Contours Via Excitatory-Inhibitory Interactions in the Visual Cortex.

In this paper we mimic a biological visual strategy to extract salient contours from complex scenes. Psychophysical and physiological studies show that the response to the stimulus within the receptive field is affected by the presence of surrounding stimuli— the response is suppressed significantly by similarly oriented stimuli in the surround while this suppression is converted to strong facilitation with the addition of collinear stimuli in the surround. According to this property of visual perception, we enhance salient contours and at the same time reduce the interference of the extraneous elements. Our results show the feasibility of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]