Previous research has shown that interacting with natural environments vs. more urban or built environments can have salubrious psychological effects, such as improvements in attention and memory. Even viewing pictures of nature vs. pictures of built environments can produce similar effects. A major question is: What is it about natural environments that produces these benefits? Problematically...

The human visual system is remarkably tolerant to degradation in image resolution: human performance in scene categorization remains high no matter whether low-resolution images or multimegapixel images are used. This observation raises the question of how many pixels are required to form a meaningful representation of an image and identify the objects it contains. In this article, we show that...

To truly understand the visual world our models should be able not only to recognize images but also generate them. To this end, there has been exciting recent progress on generating images from natural language descriptions. These methods give stunning results on limited domains such as descriptions of birds or flowers, but struggle to faithfully reproduce complex sentences with many objects a...

Our remarkable ability to process complex visual scenes is supported by a network of scene-selective cortical regions. Despite growing knowledge about the scene representation in these regions, much less is known about the temporal dynamics with which these representations emerge. We conducted two experiments aimed at identifying and characterizing the earliest markers of scene-specific process...

We address the problem of computing the 3-dimensional shape of an arbitrary scene from a set of images taken at known viewpoints. Multi-camera scene reconstruction is a natural generalization of the stereo matching problem. However, it is much more difficult than stereo, primarily due to the difficulty of reasoning about visibility. In this paper, we take an approach that has yielded excellent ...

This paper proposes a computational model for visual perception: the visual pathway is considered as a functional process of dimensionality reduction for input data, that is, to search for the intrinsic dimensionality of natural scene images. This model is hierarchically constructed, and final leads to the formation of a low-dimensional space called perceptual manifold. Further analysis of the ...

Scene text contains significant and beneficial information. Extraction and localization of scene text is used in many applications. In this paper, we propose a connected component based method to extract text from natural images. The proposed method uses color space processing. Histogram analysis and geometrical properties are used for edge detection. Character recognition is done through OCR w...

In a society driven by visual information and with the drastic expansion of low-priced cameras, vision techniques are more and more considered and text recognition is nowadays a fast changing field, which is included in a large spectrum, named text understanding. Previously, text recognition was dealing with documents only; those which were acquired with flatbed, sheet-fed or mounted imaging de...