Image understanding, attention and human early visual cortex

Abstract

This paper reviews our recent fMRI and psychophysical finding on: 1) perceived size representation in V1; 2) border ownership representation in V2; and 3) neural processing of partially occluded face. These findings demonstrate that the human early visual cortex not only performs local feature analyses, but also contributes significantly to high-level visual computation with assistance of attention-enabled cortical feedback. Moreover, by taking advantage of recent findings on early visual cortex from neuroscience and cognitive science, we build a biologically plausible attention model that can well predict human scanpaths on natural images.