The visual system must learn to infer the presence of objects and features in the world from the images it encounters, and as such it must, either implicitly or explicitly, model the way these elements interact to create the image. Do the response properties of cells in the mammalian visual system reflect this constraint? To address this question, we constructed a probabilistic model in which t...

Existing methods for grouping edges on the basis of local smoothness measures fail to compute complete contours in natural images: it appears that a stronger global constraint is required. Motivated by growing evidence that the human visual system exploits contour closure for the purposes of perceptual grouping [6, 7, 14, 15, 25], we present an algorithm for computing highly closed bounding con...

the realization optimality theory is a recent development in the original optimality theory which is proposed to deal with morphological issues especially the inflectional ones. its main idea is to consider the morphological realization rules as ranked violable language-specific constraints that control the realization processes and provide phonological information of grammatical morphemes. thi...

This paper proposes a two-step graph partitioning method to discover constrained clusters with an objective function that follows the well-known minmax clustering principle. Compared with traditional approaches, the proposed method has several advantages. Firstly, the objective function not only follows the theoretical min-max principle but also reflects certain practical requirements. Secondly...