Statistical-mechanical modeling of digital halftoning is proposed. The digital halftoning dealt with here is achieved by making use of the threshold mask, and for each pixel, the halftoned pixel is determined as black (set to one) if the original grayscale pixel is greater than or equal to the mask value and is determined as white (set to zero) vice versa. Basically, our method is a kind of the...

A letter in the peripheral visual field is much harder to identify in the presence of nearby letters. This is called “crowding”. In general, masking is a procedure: introducing any “mask” pattern that affects discriminability of the signal. Crowding conforms to the masking paradigm, but the crowding effect is unlike ordinary masking. Here we characterize crowding, and present diagnostic tests t...

A recent series of experiments has shown that the effects of near-threshold stimuli on perceptual and motor responses are highly dependent on experimental conditions. In particular, motor influences of near-threshold distractors were observed when using low-contrast unmasked stimuli and high-contrast masked stimuli although only the latter affected motor responses in the absence of stimulus awa...

Do texture-sensitive mechanisms operate separately on, or pool, luminance and colour contrast information? We addressed this question by measuring threshold-versus-amplitude functions for orientation-modulated (OM) gratings comprised of gabor elements defined by either colour or luminance contrast. In both the uncrossed (all elements in test and mask defined by either colour or luminance contra...

A letter in the peripheral visual field is much harder to identify in the presence of nearby letters. This is "crowding." Both crowding and ordinary masking are special cases of "masking," which, in general, refers to any effect of a "mask" pattern on the discriminability of a signal. Here we characterize crowding, and propose a diagnostic test to distinguish it from ordinary masking. In ordina...

The Gollin test (measuring recognition thresholds for fragmented line drawings of everyday objects and animals) has traditionally been regarded as a test of incomplete figure perception or 'closure', though there is a debate about how such closure is achieved. Here, figural incompleteness is considered to be the result of masking, such that absence of contour elements of a fragmented figure is ...

Contrast-modulated (CM) gratings, composed of two luminance-modulated sinusoids of similar spatial frequency, mask the detection of test sinusoids at the difference frequency. However, the mechanism underlying masking by CM gratings remains poorly understood. In this paper, we aimed to determine whether the masking of 1 cycle deg(-1) LM test gratings by a 1 cycle deg(-1) beat (formed from a pai...

Uniqueness, up to a global phase, is proved for phasing with a random roughly known mask (RKM) of high uncertainty. Phasing algorithms alternating between the object update and the mask update are systematically tested and demonstrated to have the capability of nearly perfect recovering the object and the mask (within the object support) simultaneously for up to 50% mask uncertainty. The uncert...