Motion detection, noise reduction, texture suppression, and contour enhancement by spatiotemporal Gabor filters with surround inhibition

Abstract

We study the orientation and speed tuning properties of spatiotemporal three-dimensional (3D) Gabor and motion energy filters as models of time-dependent receptive fields of simple and complex cells in the primary visual cortex (V1). We augment the motion energy operator with surround suppression to model the inhibitory effect of stimuli outside the classical receptive field. We show that spatiotemporal integration and surround suppression lead to substantial noise reduction. We propose an effective and straightforward motion detection computation that uses the population code of a set of motion energy filters tuned to different velocities. We also show that surround inhibition leads to suppression of texture and thus improves the visibility of object contours and facilitates figure/ground segregation and the detection and recognition of objects.