Natural scenes statistics and visual saliency

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event Natural scenes statistics and visual saliency Jinhua Xu1*, Joe Tsien1, 2 and Zhiyong Yang1, 3 1 Van der Veer Institute for Parkinson's and Brain Research, Brain and Behavior Discovery Institute, United States 2 Van der Veer Institute for Parkinson's and Brain Research, Department of Neurology, United States 3 Van der Veer Institute for Parkinson's and Brain Research, Department of Ophthalmology, United States Visual saliency is the perceptual quality that makes some items in visual scenes stand out from their immediate contexts. Visual saliency plays important roles in natural vision in that saliency can direct eye movement, deploy attention, and facilitate object detection and scene understanding. Natural visual scenes consist of objects of various physical properties that are arranged in three dimensional space in a variety of ways. When projected onto the retina, visual scenes entail highly structured statistics, occurring over the full range natural variation in the world. Thus, a given visual feature could appear in many different ways and in a variety of contexts in natural scenes. Dealing effectively with these enormous variations in visual feature and their contexts is a paramount requirement for routinely successful behaviors. Thus, for visual saliency to have any biological utility for natural vision, it has to tie to the statistics of natural variations of visual features and the statistics of co-occurrences of natural contexts. Therefore, we propose to explore and test a novel, broad hypothesis that visual saliency is based on efficient neural representations of the probability distributions (PDs) of visual variables in specific contexts in natural scenes, referred to as context-mediated PDs in natural scenes. We first develop efficient representations of context-mediated PDs of a range of basic visual variables in natural scenes. We derive these PDs from the Netherland database of natural scenes and the McGill dataset of natural color images using independent component analysis. We then derive a measure of visual saliency based on context-mediated PDs in natural scenes. Experimental results show that visual saliency derived in this way predicts a wide range of perceptual observations related to texture perception, pop-out, saliency-based attention, and visual search in natural scenes. Conference: 2010 South East Nerve Net (SENN) and Georgia/South Carolina Neuroscience Consortium (GASCNC) conferences, Atlanta , United States, 5 Mar - 7 Mar, 2010. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Posters Citation: Xu J, Tsien J and Yang Z (2010). Natural scenes statistics and visual saliency. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: 2010 South East Nerve Net (SENN) and Georgia/South Carolina Neuroscience Consortium (GASCNC) conferences. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.04.00091 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 18 Mar 2010; Published Online: 18 Mar 2010. * Correspondence: Jinhua Xu, Van der Veer Institute for Parkinson's and Brain Research, Brain and Behavior Discovery Institute, Christchurch, United States, jixu@mcg.edu Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Jinhua Xu Joe Tsien Zhiyong Yang Google Jinhua Xu Joe Tsien Zhiyong Yang Google Scholar Jinhua Xu Joe Tsien Zhiyong Yang PubMed Jinhua Xu Joe Tsien Zhiyong Yang Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.