Physiological Computation of Binocular

Physiological Computation of Binocular Disparity 1 Abstract We previously proposed a physiologically realistic model for stereo vision based on the quantitative binocular receptive eld prooles mapped by Freeman and coworkers. Here we present several new results about the model that shed light on the physiological processes involved in disparity computation. First, we show that our model can be extended to a much more general class of receptive eld prooles than the commonly used Gabor functions. Second, we demonstrate that there is, however, an advantage of using the Gabor lters: Similar to our perception, the stereo algorithm with the Gabor lters has a small bias towards zero disparity. Third, we prove that the complex cells as described by Freeman et al. compute disparity by eeectively summing up two related cross products between the band-pass ltered left and right retinal image patches. This operation is related to cross-correlation but it overcomes some major problems with the standard correlator. Fourth, we demonstrate that as few as two complex cells at each spatial location are suucient for a reasonable estimation of binocular disparity. Fifth, we nd that our model can be signiicantly improved by considering the fact that complex cell receptive elds are on average larger than those of simple cells. This fact is incorporated into the model by averaging over several quadrature pairs of simple cells with nearby and overlapping receptive elds to construct a model complex cell. The disparity tuning curve of the resulting complex cell is much more reliable than that constructed from a single quadrature pair of simple cells used previously, and the computed disparity maps for random dot stere-ograms with the new algorithm are very similar to human perception, with sharp transitions at disparity boundaries. Finally, we show that under most circumstances our algorithm works equally well with either of the two well-known receptive eld models in the literature.