Recognizing the gist of a visual scene: possible perceptual and neural mechanisms

We try to understand the basics of human image processing from a gist recognition per7 spective. Because the gist is only a subset of the image’s information, we think that it is extracted with help of interpretation (feedback). In a perceptual section we list possible mech9 anisms that the interpretation process uses to determine the gist: in addition to the commonly known local-to-global perception evolvement, there is likely to be also a global-to-local evolve11 ment direction, a coarse=.ne scale, as well as a foreground=background scale. In a neural section we .rst summarize feedback connections that can possibly be involved in gist recognition. Sec13 ond, we propose that the perceptual mechanisms are spread all over the cortex and that cortical visual computation occurs distributively rather than hierarchical. c © 2002 Published by Elsevier 15 Science B.V.