A biologically plausible model of early visual motion processing. I: theory and implementation

Measurement of rate of expansion in the perception of radial motion

Optic flow generated by rigid surface patches can be decomposed into a small number of elementary motion types. In these experiments, we show that the human visual system can evaluate expansion, one of these motion types, metrically. Moreover, we show that the discrimination of rates of expansion are spatially local. Because the estimation of the focus of expansion is somewhat imprecise, this locality sometimes produces predictable errors in the estimation of rate of expansion. One can make predictions like this with a model adapted from one previously developed for angular-velocity discrimination.

A model for the spatial integration and differentiation of velocity signals

We present a model of optic flow processing which is able to reconcile the integrative, cooperative phenomena of motion capture and coherence with the differentiation of velocity signals in motion segmentation and transparency. The model uses a Markov random field to compute the behaviour of coextensive topographic neural maps of retinotopy and velocity. We have used the model to simulate the psychophysics of motion coherence, motion capture and transparency. Further, it exhibits motion segmentation without extra postulates. The model is robust and able to display all types of motion percept with the same parameter set.

Rotation and radical motion thresholds support a two-stage model of differential-motion analysis

Lower motion thresholds for rotational and radial flow have been measured for stimuli consisting of four closely packed circular apertures, each containing patches of drifting grating or plaid. Detection and direction thresholds were measured for gratings and plaids as a function of the relative orientation of the pattern components. There was a similarity between both types of threshold, supporting the existence of specialised rotation and radial-flow detectors. Further, thresholds increased with the relative component orientation for both gratings and plaids. This suggests that component information from a first stage, tuned spatiotemporally and to orientation, is being used directly to compute the optic flow in a two-stage process. A model based on this architecture is described by means of simple template receptive-field arrays with separable temporal and spatial tuning at the first stage.