Asynchronous maturation of visual system structures: Lessons from color blindness

Abstract

It is common practice to utilize evidence from biological and psychological vision experiments to develop computational models for low-level feature extraction. The receptive profiles of simple cells in mammalian visual systems have been found to closely resemble Gabor filters. Daugman proved that Gabor filters achieve joint minimal joint uncertainty. These results led researchers to develop computational models based on Gabor filters for several low-level vision applications such as edge detection, texture classification, optical flow estimation and data compression. In this paper, the performance of a Gabor odd filter-based edge detector is investigated using the measures proposed by Canny. Based on this performance analysis a design criterion for one-dimensional (1D) Gabor filter-based edge detector is derived. It is shown that this design criterion also holds good for a two-dimensional (2D) Gabor filter-based edge detector. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the Gabor filter-based edge detector.