Double Ring Model for Foveated Imaging

Abstract

Human visual system has a space-variant resolution nature. In the retinal receptive field, the resolution is not uniform but sampled finest in the central fovea and coarser in the peripheral. This variable resolution mapping function is born by the cerebral primary visual cortex V1. It has a clear visual field map of spatial information, and this spatial mapping structure is called Retinotopy. The forward mapping to visual cortex from retina is characterized with complex LPT (Log-PolarTransform) by Schwartz. The retinal receptive field image is reconstructed by inverse projection LPT-1 from V1. This reconstructed process is called F oveated I maging. Since the spatial information is concentrated in the center of the visual field, the Foveated Imaging is applied to image compression, pattern recognition, robot vision, and/or computer vision. The retinal receptive field image is suitable for material appearance expression with natural blurring due to peripheral vision.<br/> However, the complexity of the inverse transform LPT-1 was a bottleneck. This paper proposes a Double- Ring-structured novel Foveated Imaging method using positive and negative Gaussian blur masks without using the inverse transform LPT-1 of Schwartz theory and reports the evaluation of reproduction errors.