Contour detection model with multi-scale integration based on non-classical receptive field

The broad region outside the classical receptive field (CRF) of a vision neuron, known as the non-classical receptive field (nCRF), exerts a robust modulatory effect on the responses to visual stimuli presented within the CRF, and plays an important role in visual information processing. One possible role for the nCRF is the extract object contours from disorderly background textures. In this study, a multi-scale integration based contour extraction model, inspired by the inhibitory and disinhibitory interactions between the CRF and the nCRF is presented. Unlike previous models, our model not only includes both the simple and complex cell mechanisms but also introduces pre-processing of the external information by the retinal ganglion cells at an early stage. The multi-scale representation of a physical scene acquired through such pre-processing was filtered through Gabor filters, and then inhibited or disinhibited at different spatial locations on different scales until a final response was obtained. Our results show that by introducing this kind of mechanism into the model, numbers of non-meaningful texture elements can be removed significantly, while at the same time, the object contours can be detected effectively. In addition to the superior contour detection performance in comparison to other contour detection models, our model provides a better understanding of the role of the nCRF and a novel approach for computer vision and pattern recognition.