Inversion of the divisive contrast normalization: algorithms and new possibilities.

Jesús Malo
Presented at Psychology Dept. Stanford University, April 2001

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that early stages in visual processing involve a local
linear frequency transform of the image followed by a nonlinear response to the
transform coefficients. This nonlinear response involves normalization of each transform
coefficient by the responses of neighbouring cells [Heeger92,93].
Through these two steps, image space is mapped onto response space. Being able to
return to image space from response space would be very useful in diverse fields,
such as psychophysics or image coding. However, while the linear transform is invertible,
the interactions among the coefficients in the divisive normalization make it noninvertible.

In this talk I will present a differential approach to solve this inversion problem as
opposed to a conventional brute-force search. In the differential approach the
inversion problem is formulated as an 'initial-value-problem', so the existence and
uniqueness of the solution is theoretically guaranteed.
Beyond these theoretical advantages, the convergence results show that while the
differential method successfully solves the problem, a comparable iterative search highly
depends on the initial guess and is easily trapped into local minima. Finally, I will show
some applications of this new approach in the context of image coding and vision modeling.

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