Representation Of Spatial Information Research Articles

Innovative graph neural network approach for predicting soil heavy metal pollution in the Pearl River Basin, China

Predicting soil heavy metal (HM) content is crucial for monitoring soil quality and ensuring ecological health. However, existing methods often neglect the spatial dependency of data. To address this gap, our study introduces a novel graph neural network (GNN) model, Multi-Scale Attention-based Graph Neural Network for Heavy Metal Prediction (MSA-GNN-HMP). The model integrates multi-scale graph convolutional network (MS-GCN) and attention-based GNN (AGNN) to capture spatial relationships. Using surface soil samples from the Pearl River Basin, we evaluate the MSA-GNN-HMP model against four other models. The experimental results show that the MSA-GNN-HMP model has the best predictive performance for Cd and Pb, with a coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.841 for Cd and 0.886 for Pb, and the lowest mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.403 mg kg−1 for Cd and 0.670 mg kg−1 for Pb, as well as the lowest root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.563 mg kg−1for Cd and 0.898 mg kg−1 for Pb. In feature importance analysis, latitude and longitude emerged as key factors influencing the heavy metal content. The spatial distribution prediction trend of heavy metal elements by different prediction methods is basically consistent, with the high-value areas of Cd and Pb respectively distributed in the northwest and northeast of the basin center. However, the MSA-GNN-HMP model demonstrates superior detail representation in spatial prediction. MSA-GNN-HMP model has excellent spatial information representation capabilities and can more accurately predict heavy metal content and spatial distribution, providing a new theoretical basis for monitoring, assessing, and managing soil pollution.

Multimodal fusion for audio-image and video action recognition

Multimodal Human Action Recognition (MHAR) is an important research topic in computer vision and event recognition fields. In this work, we address the problem of MHAR by developing a novel audio-image and video fusion-based deep learning framework that we call Multimodal Audio-Image and Video Action Recognizer (MAiVAR). We extract temporal information using image representations of audio signals and spatial information from video modality with the help of Convolutional Neutral Networks (CNN)-based feature extractors and fuse these features to recognize respective action classes. We apply a high-level weights assignment algorithm for improving audio-visual interaction and convergence. This proposed fusion-based framework utilizes the influence of audio and video feature maps and uses them to classify an action. Compared with state-of-the-art audio-visual MHAR techniques, the proposed approach features a simpler yet more accurate and more generalizable architecture, one that performs better with different audio-image representations. The system achieves an accuracy 87.9% and 79.0% on UCF51 and Kinetics Sounds datasets, respectively. All code and models for this paper will be available at https://tinyurl.com/4ps2ux6n.

A General Spatial-Frequency Learning Framework for Multimodal Image Fusion.

multimodal image fusion involves tasks like pan-sharpening and depth super-resolution. Both tasks aim to generate high-resolution target images by fusing the complementary information from the texture-rich guidance and low-resolution target counterparts. They are inborn with reconstructing high-frequency information. Despite their inherent frequency domain connection, most existing methods only operate solely in the spatial domain and rarely explore the solutions in the frequency domain. This study addresses this limitation by proposing solutions in both the spatial and frequency domains. We devise a Spatial-Frequency Information Integration Network, abbreviated as SFINet for this purpose. The SFINet includes a core module tailored for image fusion. This module consists of three key components: a spatial-domain information branch, a frequency-domain information branch, and a dual-domain interaction. The spatial-domain information branch employs the spatial convolution-equipped invertible neural operators to integrate local information from different modalities in the spatial domain. Meanwhile, the frequency-domain information branch adopts a modality-aware deep Fourier transformation to capture the image-wide receptive field for exploring global contextual information. In addition, the dual-domain interaction facilitates information flow and the learning of complementary representations. We further present an improved version of SFINet, SFINet++, that enhances the representation of spatial information by replacing the basic convolution unit in the original spatial domain branch with the information-lossless invertible neural operator. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of the proposed networks and demonstrate their outstanding performance against state-of-the-art methods in two representative multimodal image fusion tasks: pan-sharpening and depth super-resolution. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/manman1995/Awaresome-pansharpening.

Sparse Mix-Attention Transformer for Multispectral Image and Hyperspectral Image Fusion

Multispectral image (MSI) and hyperspectral image (HSI) fusion (MHIF) aims to address the challenge of acquiring high-resolution (HR) HSI images. This field combines a low-resolution (LR) HSI with an HR-MSI to reconstruct HR-HSIs. Existing methods directly utilize transformers to perform feature extraction and fusion. Despite the demonstrated success, there exist two limitations: (1) Employing the entire transformer model for feature extraction and fusion fails to fully harness the potential of the transformer in integrating the spectral information of the HSI and spatial information of the MSI. (2) HSIs have a strong spectral correlation and exhibit sparsity in the spatial domain. Existing transformer-based models do not optimize this physical property, which makes their methods prone to spectral distortion. To accomplish these issues, this paper introduces a novel framework for MHIF called a Sparse Mix-Attention Transformer (SMAformer). Specifically, to fully harness the advantages of the transformer architecture, we propose a Spectral Mix-Attention Block (SMAB), which concatenates the keys and values extracted from LR-HSIs and HR-MSIs to create a new multihead attention module. This design facilitates the extraction of detailed long-range information across spatial and spectral dimensions. Additionally, to address the spatial sparsity inherent in HSIs, we incorporated a sparse mechanism within the core of the SMAB called the Sparse Spectral Mix-Attention Block (SSMAB). In the SSMAB, we compute attention maps from queries and keys and select the K highly correlated values as the sparse-attention map. This approach enables us to achieve a sparse representation of spatial information while eliminating spatially disruptive noise. Extensive experiments conducted on three synthetic benchmark datasets, namely CAVE, Harvard, and Pavia Center, demonstrate that the SMAformer method outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Rgfc-Forest: An enhanced deep forest method towards small-sample fault diagnosis of electromechanical system

Deep forest models offer a promising alternative to traditional deep neural networks by demanding fewer training samples and hyperparameters. However, existing deep forest fault diagnosis models encounter persistent challenges such as insufficient representation of multi-grained spatial information and redundancy of cascaded forest features. To address the above challenges, an enhanced deep forest method called random multi-grained fusion cascade forest (rgfc-Forest) is presented for fault diagnosis of electromechanical systems with limited training samples. First, a random multi-grained scanning module is designed to improve feature information learning. Subsequently, a feature fusion cascade forest module is constructed to improve the representativeness of features in multi-grained scanning and cascade forest delivery while ensuring data diversity. Finally, a decision tree self-growth strategy is combined to refine the classification capability of the high-level forest. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we applied it to experimental data related to motor system and gearbox faults. Our results demonstrate significant improvements over existing methods: With just 20 samples per class, our method achieved an average accuracy of 84.41% for motor System Diagnosis. Similarly, for the gearbox system, we attained an impressive accuracy of up to 92.72% with the same limited dataset. These outcomes underscore the superior feature representation and fault classification capabilities of our approach compared to both benchmark deep forest models and mainstream deep learning methods when confronted with small training datasets.

RTAU-Net: A novel 3D rectal tumor segmentation model based on dual path fusion and attentional guidance

Background and objectiveAccording to the Global Cancer Statistics 2020, colorectal cancer has the third-highest diagnosis rate (10.0 %) and the second-highest mortality rate (9.4 %) among the 36 types. Rectal cancer accounts for a large proportion of colorectal cancer. The size and shape of the rectal tumor can directly affect the diagnosis and treatment by doctors. The existing rectal tumor segmentation methods are based on two-dimensional slices, which cannot analyze a patient's tumor as a whole and lose the correlation between slices of MRI image, so the practical application value is not high. MethodsIn this paper, a three-dimensional rectal tumor segmentation model is proposed. Firstly, image preprocessing is performed to reduce the effect caused by the unbalanced proportion of background region and target region, and improve the quality of the image. Secondly, a dual-path fusion network is designed to extract both global features and local detail features of rectal tumors. The network includes two encoders, a residual encoder for enhancing the spatial detail information and feature representation of the tumor and a transformer encoder for extracting global contour information of the tumor. In the decoding stage, we merge the information extracted from the dual paths and decode them. In addition, for the problem of the complex morphology and different sizes of rectal tumors, a multi-scale fusion channel attention mechanism is designed, which can capture important contextual information of different scales. Finally, visualize the 3D rectal tumor segmentation results. ResultsThe RTAU-Net is evaluated on the data set provided by Shanxi Provincial Cancer Hospital and Xinhua Hospital. The experimental results showed that the Dice of tumor segmentation reached 0.7978 and 0.6792, respectively, which improved by 2.78 % and 7.02 % compared with suboptimal model. ConclusionsAlthough the morphology of rectal tumors varies, RTAU-Net can precisely localize rectal tumors and learn the contour and details of tumors, which can relieve physicians' workload and improve diagnostic accuracy.

3D salient object detection based on light field integral imaging.

Potent usage of the multi-scale light field information for salient object detection (SOD) is the essential requirement of three-dimensional (3D) SOD. On this basis, a light field 3D-SOD scheme is proposed that employs the pixel mapping algorithm to achieve a more distinct representation of spatial and angular information in the four-dimensional (4D) light field, collaboratively mining the global saliency cues via the co-salient object detection (CoSOD) network. Compared with the previous method, our scheme filters out most of the noise by thoroughly leveraging the global dependence of the 4D light field, offering significant enhancements in saliency extraction performance and efficiency. Additionally, the 3D reconstruction results demonstrate the integral retention of the spatial and angular information of the original light field.

Distinct Lateral Prefrontal Regions Are Organized in an Anterior-Posterior Functional Gradient.

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is composed of multiple anatomically defined regions involved in higher-order cognitive processes, including working memory and selective attention. It is organized in an anterior-posterior global gradient where posterior regions track changes in the environment, whereas anterior regions support abstract neural representations. However, it remains unknown if such a global gradient results from a smooth gradient that spans regions or an emergent property arising from functionally distinct regions, that is, an areal gradient. Here, we recorded single neurons in the dlPFC of nonhuman primates trained to perform a memory-guided saccade task with an interfering distractor and analyzed their physiological properties along the anterior-posterior axis. We found that these physiological properties were best described by an areal gradient. Further, population analyses revealed that there is a distributed representation of spatial information across the dlPFC. Our results validate the functional boundaries between anatomically defined dlPFC regions and highlight the distributed nature of computations underlying working memory across the dlPFC.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Activity of frontal lobe regions is known to possess an anterior-posterior functional gradient. However, it is not known whether this gradient is the result of individual brain regions organized in a gradient (like a staircase), or a smooth gradient that spans regions (like a slide). Analysis of physiological properties of individual neurons in the primate frontal regions suggest that individual regions are organized as a gradient, rather than a smooth gradient. At the population level, working memory was more prominent in posterior regions, although it was also present in anterior regions. This is consistent with the functional segregation of brain regions that is also observed in other systems (i.e., the visual system).

A Learned Map for Places and Concepts in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe.

Distinct lines of research in both humans and animals point to a specific role of the hippocampus in both spatial and episodic memory function. The discovery of concept cells in the hippocampus and surrounding medial temporal lobe (MTL) regions suggests that the MTL maps physical and semantic spaces with a similar neural architecture. Here, we studied the emergence of such maps using MTL microwire recordings from 20 patients (9 female, 11 male) navigating a virtual environment featuring salient landmarks with established semantic meaning. We present several key findings. The array of local field potentials in the MTL contains sufficient information for above-chance decoding of subjects' instantaneous location in the environment. Closer examination revealed that as subjects gain experience with the environment the field potentials come to represent both the subjects' locations in virtual space and in high-dimensional semantic space. Similarly, we observe a learning effect on temporal sequence coding. Over time, field potentials come to represent future locations, even after controlling for spatial proximity. This predictive coding of future states, more so than the strength of spatial representations per se, is linked to variability in subjects' navigation performance. Our results thus support the conceptualization of the MTL as a memory space, representing both spatial- and nonspatial information to plan future actions and predict their outcomes.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Using rare microwire recordings, we studied the representation of spatial, semantic, and temporal information in the human MTL. Our findings demonstrate that subjects acquire a cognitive map that simultaneously represents the spatial and semantic relations between landmarks. We further show that the same learned representation is used to predict future states, implicating MTL cell assemblies as the building blocks of prospective memory functions.

VEDAM: Urban Vegetation Extraction Based on Deep Attention Model from High-Resolution Satellite Images

With the rapid development of satellite and internet of things (IoT) technology, it becomes more and more convenient to acquire high-resolution satellite images from the ground. Extraction of urban vegetation from high-resolution satellite images can provide valuable suggestions for the decision-making of urban management. At present, deep-learning semantic segmentation has become an important method for vegetation extraction. However, due to the poor representation of context and spatial information, the effect of segmentation is not accurate. Thus, vegetation extraction based on Deep Attention Model (VEDAM) is proposed to enhance the context and spatial information representation ability in the scenario of vegetation extraction from satellite images. Specifically, continuous convolutions are used for feature extraction, and atrous convolutions are introduced to obtain more multi-scale context information. Then the extracted features are enhanced by the Spatial Attention Module (SAM) and the atrous spatial pyramid convolution functions. In addition, image-level feature obtained by image pooling encoding global context further improves the overall performance. Experiments are conducted on real datasets Gaofen Image Dataset (GID). From the comparative experimental results, it is concluded that VEDAM achieves the best mIoU (mIoU = 0.9136) of vegetation semantic segmentation.

Enhanced road information representation in graph recurrent network for traffic speed prediction

AbstractCorrectly capturing the spatial‐temporal correlation of traffic sequences will benefit to make accurate predictions of the future traffic states. In the paper, the methods of enhancing road spatial and temporal information representation are proposed. Firstly, the parameter matrix of each road is constructed to represent the road‐specific traffic patterns for the graph convolution neural network and the recurrent neural network. Then, the node embedding, and matrix factorization are used to reduce the scale of the parameter matrix. Secondly, the node embedding‐based Data Adaptive Graph Generation model was introduced to infer the indirect relationship of each node, and the gating mechanism is designed to control the weights of the direct spatial information and the indirect spatial information. Thirdly, to enhance the traffic sequence representation, the time tag and peak tag for the sequences are designed at each sampling moment. At last, the Enhanced Road Information Representation in Graph Recurrent Network (En‐GRN) is proposed to predict traffic speed, and the prediction performance is tested on SZ‐taxi and Los‐loop dataset. The experimental results show that the presented works are effective for improving traffic prediction accuracy.

Trigeminal stimulation is required for neural representations of bimodal odor localization: A time-resolved multivariate EEG and fNIRS study

Whereas neural representations of spatial information are commonly studied in vision, olfactory stimuli might also be able to create such representations via the trigeminal system. We explored in two independent multi-method electroencephalography–functional near-infrared spectroscopy (EEG+fNIRS) experiments (n1=18, n2=14) if monorhinal odor stimuli can evoke spatial representations in the brain. We tested whether this representation depends on trigeminal properties of the stimulus, and if the retention in short-term memory follows the “sensorimotor recruitment theory”, using multivariate representational similarity analysis (RSA). We demonstrate that the delta frequency band up to 5 Hz across the scull entail spatial information of which nostril has been stimulated. Delta frequencies were localized in a network involving primary and secondary olfactory, motor-sensory and occipital regions. RSA on fNIRS data showed that monorhinal stimulations evoke neuronal representations in motor-sensory regions and that this representation is kept stable beyond the time of perception. These effects were no longer valid when the odor stimulus did not sufficiently stimulate the trigeminal nerve as well. Our results are first evidence that the trigeminal system can create spatial representations of bimodal odors in the brain and that these representations follow similar principles as the other sensory systems.

A Neural Network-Based Partial Fingerprint Image Identification Method for Crime Scenes

Fingerprints are the most widely used of all biological characteristics in public safety and forensic identification. However, fingerprint images extracted from the crime scene are incomplete. On the one hand, due to the lack of effective area in partial fingerprint images, the extracted features are insufficient. On the other hand, a broken ridge may lead to a large number of false feature points, which affect the accuracy of fingerprint recognition. Existing fingerprint identification methods are not ideal for partial fingerprint identification. To overcome these problems, this paper proposes an attention-based partial fingerprint identification model named APFI. Firstly, the algorithm utilizes the residual network (ResNet) for feature descriptor extraction, which generates a representation of spatial information on fingerprint expression. Secondly, the channel attention module is inserted into the proposed model to obtain more accurate fingerprint feature information from the residual block. Then, to improve the identification accuracy of partial fingerprints, the angular distance between features is used to calculate the similarity of fingerprints. Finally, the proposed model is trained and validated on a home-made partial fingerprint image dataset. Experiments on the home-made fingerprint datasets and the NIST-SD4 datasets show that the partial fingerprint identification method proposed in this paper has higher identification accuracy than other state-of-the-art methods.

TransU²-Net: An Effective Medical Image Segmentation Framework Based on Transformer and U²-Net.

In the past few years, U-Net based U-shaped architecture and skip-connections have made incredible progress in the field of medical image segmentation. U2-Net achieves good performance in computer vision. However, in the medical image segmentation task, U2-Net with over nesting is easy to overfit. A 2D network structure TransU2-Net combining transformer and a lighter weight U2-Net is proposed for automatic segmentation of brain tumor magnetic resonance image (MRI). The light-weight U2-Net architecture not only obtains multi-scale information but also reduces redundant feature extraction. Meanwhile, the transformer block embedded in the stacked convolutional layer obtains more global information; the transformer with skip-connection enhances spatial domain information representation. A new multi-scale feature map fusion strategy as a postprocessing method was proposed for better fusing high and low-dimensional spatial information. Our proposed model TransU2-Net achieves better segmentation results, on the BraTS2021 dataset, our method achieves an average dice coefficient of 88.17%; Evaluation on the publicly available MSD dataset, we perform tumor evaluation, we achieve a dice coefficient of 74.69%; in addition to comparing the TransU2-Net results are compared with previously proposed 2D segmentation methods. We propose an automatic medical image segmentation method combining transformers and U2-Net, which has good performance and is of clinical importance. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other 2D medical image segmentation methods. Clinical Translation Statement: We use the BarTS2021 dataset and the MSD dataset which are publicly available databases. All experiments in this paper are in accordance with medical ethics.

Dissimilate-and-assimilate strategy for video anomaly detection and localization

Unsupervised anomaly detection in videos is a challenging task owing to the remarkable generalization capacity of the deep convolutional autoencoders and the complex nature of anomalous events. In this study, we introduce a dissimilate-and-assimilate strategy to learn essential patterns of multilevel latent representations of normal spatial and temporal information. To obtain the core normality of the appearance and motion samples over multiple layers of the network, our proposed method diversifies the latent patterns of normal spatial and temporal data to make the out-of-distribution samples discrete (dissimilation) and integrates the latent features of two different samples into a single sample using a feature attention mechanism for robust optimization (assimilation). Based on the learned representations, the network generates convincing predictions of the normal frame, even if it receives abnormal samples after training. That is, the anomalous objects in a series of frames can be detected with significant reconstruction errors, thus leading to better detection and precise localization performance. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we quantify the preciseness of anomaly localization using the outside-inside error ratio along with the traditional area under the curve (AUC) metric to measure the detection performance on the USCD Pedestrian 2, CHUK Avenue and ShanghaiTech Campus datasets.

Geometrical representation of serial order in working memory.

Encoding a sequence relies on one's memory for ordinal succession of events and is critical for episodic memory, spatial navigation, language, and other cognitive functions. Investigating the neural mechanisms underlying sequence working memory in the macaque prefrontal cortex, Xie et al. (Science, 375, 632-639, 2022) uncovered a novel integrated representation of temporal and spatial information in different subspaces of a high-dimensional neural state space, offering broad implications across comparative cognition and neuroscience.

Facial Expression Recognition: One Attention-Modulated Contextual Spatial Information Network.

Facial expression recognition (FER) in the wild is a challenging task due to some uncontrolled factors such as occlusion, illumination, and pose variation. The current methods perform well in controlled conditions. However, there are still two issues with the in-the-wild FER task: (i) insufficient descriptions of long-range dependency of expression features in the facial information space and (ii) not finely refining subtle inter-classes distinction from multiple expressions in the wild. To overcome the above issues, an end-to-end model for FER, named attention-modulated contextual spatial information network (ACSI-Net), is presented in this paper, with the manner of embedding coordinate attention (CA) modules into a contextual convolutional residual network (CoResNet). Firstly, CoResNet is constituted by arranging contextual convolution (CoConv) blocks of different levels to integrate facial expression features with long-range dependency, which generates a holistic representation of spatial information on facial expression. Then, the CA modules are inserted into different stages of CoResNet, at each of which the subtle information about facial expression acquired from CoConv blocks is first modulated by the corresponding CA module across channels and spatial locations and then flows into the next layer. Finally, to highlight facial regions related to expression, a CA module located at the end of the whole network, which produces attentional masks to multiply by input feature maps, is utilized to focus on salient regions. Different from other models, the ACSI-Net is capable of exploring intrinsic dependencies between features and yielding a discriminative representation for facial expression classification. Extensive experimental results on AffectNet and RAF_DB datasets demonstrate its effectiveness and competitiveness compared to other FER methods.

Position-aware image captioning with spatial relation

Image caption aims to generate a language description of a given image. The problem can be solved by learning semantic information of visual objects and generating descriptions based on extracted embedding. However, the spatial relationship between visual objects and their static position is not fully explored by existing methods. In this work, we propose a Position-Aware Transformer (PAT) model that extracts both regional and static global visual features and unify both the regional and global by incorporating spatial information aligned to each visual feature. To make a better representation of spatial information and correlation between extracted visual features, we propose and compare three subtle approaches to explore position embedding with spatial relation information explicitly. Moreover, we jointly consider the static global and regional embedding for spatial modeling. Experimental results illustrate that our proposed model achieves competitive performance on the COCO image captioning dataset, where the PAT model could respectively reach 38.7, 28.6, and 58.6 on BLEU-4, METEOR, and ROUGE-L respectively. Extensive experiments suggest that the proposed PAT model could also reach competitive performance on related visual-language tasks including visual question answering (VQA) and multi-modal retrieval. Detailed ablation studies are conducted to report how each part would contribute to the final performance, which could be a good reference for follow-up spatial information representation works.

FABNet: Fusion Attention Block and Transfer Learning for Laryngeal Cancer Tumor Grading in P63 IHC Histopathology Images.

Laryngeal cancer tumor (LCT) grading is a challenging task in P63 Immunohistochemical (IHC) histopathology images due to small differences between LCT levels in pathology images, the lack of precision in lesion regions of interest (LROIs) and the paucity of LCT pathology image samples. The key to solving the LCT grading problem is to transfer knowledge from other images and to identify more accurate LROIs, but the following problems occur: 1) transferring knowledge without a priori experience often causes negative transfer and creates a heavy workload due to the abundance of image types, and 2) convolutional neural networks (CNNs) constructing deep models by stacking cannot sufficiently identify LROIs, often deviate significantly from the LROIs focused on by experienced pathologists, and are prone to providing misleading second opinions. So we propose a novel fusion attention block network (FABNet) to address these problems. First, we propose a model transfer method based on clinical a priori experience and sample analysis (CPESA) that analyzes the transfer ability by integrating clinical a priori experience using indicators such as the relationship between the cancer onset location and morphology and the texture and staining degree of cell nuclei in histopathology images; our method further validates these indicators by the probability distribution of cancer image samples. Then, we propose a fusion attention block (FAB) structure, which can both provide an advanced non-uniform sparse representation of images and extract spatial relationship information between nuclei; consequently, the LROI can be more accurate and more relevant to pathologists. We conducted extensive experiments, compared with the best Baseline model, the classification accuracy is improved 25%, and It is demonstrated that FABNet performs better on different cancer pathology image datasets and outperforms other state of the art (SOTA) models.

Contributed Session III: Assessing the neural coding of image blur using multivariate pattern analysis

Blur is a fundamental perceptual attribute of images, but the way in which the visual system encodes this attribute remains poorly understood. Previously, we examined the neural correlates of blur by measuring BOLD responses to in-focus images and their blurred or sharpened counterparts, formed by varying the slope of the amplitude spectra but maintaining constant RMS contrast (Tregillus et al. 2014). In visual cortex (V1-V4), highest activation occurred for in-focus images compared to blurred or sharpened images - a finding which counters expectations from norm-based or predictive coding but is consistent with other studies examining the effects of manipulating the 1/f amplitude spectrum (Olman et al. 2004; Isherwood et al. 2017). To further examine the representation of blur, here we reanalysed this dataset using multivariate pattern analysis and also expanded the analysis to include additional visual areas (VO1, VO2, V3AB, LO, TO). A linear classifier trained to distinguish blurred vs. sharpened images provided significant decoding irrespective of visual area, suggesting that information about blur may be preserved across much of the visual hierarchy. The decoding may reflect larger scale differences in the representation of spatial frequency information within regions (e.g. as a function of eccentricity) or a finer scale columnar organization.