The utility of image descriptions in the initial stages of vision: A case study of printed text
- 1 February 2010
- journal article
- Published by Wiley in British Journal of Psychology
- Vol. 101 (1), 1-26
- https://doi.org/10.1348/000712608x379070
Abstract
Vision research has made very substantial progress towards understanding how we see. It is one area of psychology where the three-way thrust of behavioural measurements (psychophysics), brain imaging, and computational studies have been combined quite routinely for some years. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a relatively unusual form of computational modelling that we characterise as involving image descriptions. Image descriptions are statements about structures in images and relationships between structures. Most modelling in vision is either conceived in fairly abstract terms, or is done at the level of images. Neither is entirely satisfactory, and image descriptions are a simple formulation of age-old ideas about a Vocabulary of image features that are detected and parameterized from actual digital images.For our example, we use the domain of the visual perception of printed text. This is an area that has been characterized by thorough, robust psychophysical experiments. The fundamental requirements of visual processing in this domain are: grouping of some parts if the image into words; at the same time segmenting words from each other. We show how these are readily understood in terms of our model of image descriptions, and show quantitatively that typographical practice, refined over centuries, is about optimum for the visual system at least as represented by our model. In addition, we show that the same notion of image descriptions could, in principle, support word recognition in certain circumstances.Keywords
This publication has 35 references indexed in Scilit:
- Parts, Wholes, and Context in Reading: A Triple DissociationPLOS ONE, 2007
- Shift in spatial scale in identifying crowded lettersVision Research, 2007
- Global Contour Saliency and Local Colinear InteractionsJournal of Neurophysiology, 2002
- The function of dynamic grouping in visionTrends in Cognitive Sciences, 2000
- On the Lawfulness of Grouping by ProximityCognitive Psychology, 1998
- The Correlational Structure of Natural Images and the Calibration of Spatial RepresentationsCognitive Science, 1997
- Normalization of cell responses in cat striate cortexVisual Neuroscience, 1992
- Word shape, orthographic regularity, and contextual interactions in a reading taskCognition, 1982
- Ferrier lecture - Functional architecture of macaque monkey visual cortexProceedings of the Royal Society of London. B. Biological Sciences, 1977
- Analysis of occluding contourProceedings of the Royal Society of London. B. Biological Sciences, 1977