Single pixel information content

摘要

Inspired by the analogy between computer-based visual systems and their biological counterparts, we propose to introduce two new concepts: the concept of a pixel's receptive field (analogous to neural cells' receptive fields in the eye's retina), and its derivation - the concept of information content of a single pixel (analogous to the output activity of the retina's neural cells). Exploiting these new concepts, we suggest a quantitative measure for the dissimilarity between a pixel and its surrounding neighbors, which we define as a measure of pixel's information content. With such a measure at the hand, many image processing tasks that usually require (for their successful accomplishment) some information related assumptions could be reformulated and redesigned to gain new and unknown computation efficiency of image features detection, description and discrimination. On this basis, new image processing techniques could be devised. Lena images processed by applying some of these techniques are presented for illustration purposes.