Outside the classical receptive field (CRF), there exists a broad non-classical receptive field (NCRF). The response of the central neuron is affected not only by the stimulus inside the CRF, but also modulated by the stimulus surrounding it. The contextual modulation is mediated by horizontal connections across the visual cortex. In this paper, a contour detection method inspired by the visual mechanism in the primary visual cortex (V1) is proposed. The method is divided in three steps. Firstly, the response of every single visual neuron in V1 is computed by local energy. Secondly, the facilitation and suppression (the contextual influence) on a neuron through horizontal interactions are obtained by constructing a two neighbor modulating functions. Finally, the total output response of one neuron to complex visual stimuli is acquired by combing the influence of local visual context on the neuron and energy response by itself. We tested it on natural image and encouraging results were acquired.
展开▼
