Salient Contour Extraction by Temporal Binding in a Cortically-based Network

It has been suggested that long-range intrinsic connections in striate cortex may play a role in contour extraction (Gilbert et al., 1996). A number of recent physiological and psychophysical studies have examined the possible role of long range connections in the modulation of contrast detection thresholds (Polat and Sagi, 1993,1994; Kapadia et al., 1995; Kovács and Julesz, 1994) and various pre-attentive detection tasks (Kovács and Julesz, 1993; Field et al., 1993). We have developed a network architecture based on the anatomical connectivity of striate cortex, as well as the temporal dynamics of neuronal processing, that is able to reproduce the observed experimental results. The network has been tested on real images and has applications in terms of identifying salient contours in automatic image processing systems.