No Arabic abstract
Optic flow is two dimensional, but no special qualities are attached to one or other of these dimensions. For binocular disparity, on the other hand, the terms horizontal and vertical disparities are commonly used. This is odd, since binocular disparity and optic flow describe essentially the same thing. The difference is that, generally, people tend to fixate relatively close to the direction of heading as they move, meaning that fixation is close to the optic flow epipole, whereas, for binocular vision, fixation is close to the head-centric midline, i.e. approximately 90 degrees from the binocular epipole. For fixating animals, some separations of flow may lead to simple algorithms for the judgement of surface structure and the control of action. We consider the following canonical flow patterns that sum to produce overall flow: (i) towards flow, the component of translational flow produced by approaching (or retreating from) the fixated object, which produces pure radial flow on the retina; (ii) sideways flow, the remaining component of translational flow, which is produced by translation of the optic centre orthogonal to the cyclopean line of sight and (iii) vergence flow, rotational flow produced by a counter-rotation of the eye in order to maintain fixation. A general flow pattern could also include (iv) cyclovergence flow, produced by rotation of one eye relative to the other about the line of sight. We consider some practical advantages of dividing up flow in this way when an observer fixates as they move. As in some previous treatments, we suggest that there are certain tasks for which it is sensible to consider towards flow as one component and sideways + vergence flow as another.
On the basis of the general character and operation of the process of perception, a formalism is sought to mathematically describe the subjective or abstract/mental process of perception. It is shown that the formalism of orthodox quantum theory of measurement, where the observer plays a key role, is a broader mathematical foundation which can be adopted to describe the dynamics of the subjective experience. The mathematical formalism describes the psychophysical dynamics of the subjective or cognitive experience as communicated to us by the subject. Subsequently, the formalism is used to describe simple perception processes and, in particular, to describe the probability distribution of dominance duration obtained from the testimony of subjects experiencing binocular rivalry. Using this theory and parameters based on known values of neuronal oscillation frequencies and firing rates, the calculated probability distribution of dominance duration of rival states in binocular rivalry under various conditions is found to be in good agreement with available experimental data. This theory naturally explains an observed marked increase in dominance duration in binocular rivalry upon periodic interruption of stimulus and yields testable predictions for the distribution of perceptual alteration in time.
This paper presents a computational framework for accurately estimating the disparity map of plenoptic images. The proposed framework is based on the variational principle and provides intrinsic sub-pixel precision. The light-field motion tensor introduced in the framework allows us to combine advanced robust data terms as well as provides explicit treatments for different color channels. A warping strategy is embedded in our framework for tackling the large displacement problem. We also show that by applying a simple regularization term and a guided median filtering, the accuracy of displacement field at occluded area could be greatly enhanced. We demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed framework by intensive comparisons with the Lytro software and contemporary approaches on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
Entropy is a classical measure to quantify the amount of information or complexity of a system. Various entropy-based measures such as functional and spectral entropies have been proposed in brain network analysis. However, they are less widely used than traditional graph theoretic measures such as global and local efficiencies because either they are not well-defined on a graph or difficult to interpret its biological meaning. In this paper, we propose a new entropy-based graph invariant, called volume entropy. It measures the exponential growth rate of the number of paths in a graph, which is a relevant measure if information flows through the graph forever. We model the information propagation on a graph by the generalized Markov system associated to the weighted edge-transition matrix. We estimate the volume entropy using the stationary equation of the generalized Markov system. A prominent advantage of using the stationary equation is that it assigns certain distribution of weights on the edges of the brain graph, which we call the stationary distribution. The stationary distribution shows the information capacity of edges and the direction of information flow on a brain graph. The simulation results show that the volume entropy distinguishes the underlying graph topology and geometry better than the existing graph measures. In brain imaging data application, the volume entropy of brain graphs was significantly related to healthy normal aging from 20s to 60s. In addition, the stationary distribution of information propagation gives a new insight into the information flow of functional brain graph.
Model-based studies of auditory nerve responses to electrical stimulation can provide insight into the functioning of cochlear implants. Ideally, these studies can identify limitations in sound processing strategies and lead to improved methods for providing sound information to cochlear implant users. To accomplish this, models must accurately describe auditory nerve spiking while avoiding excessive complexity that would preclude large-scale simulations of populations of auditory nerve fibers and obscure insight into the mechanisms that influence neural encoding of sound information. In this spirit, we develop a point process model of the auditory nerve that provides a compact and accurate description of neural responses to electric stimulation. Inspired by the framework of generalized linear models, the proposed model consists of a cascade of linear and nonlinear stages. We show how each of these stages can be associated with biophysical mechanisms and related to models of neuronal dynamics. Moreover, we derive a semi-analytical procedure that uniquely determines each parameter in the model on the basis of fundamental statistics from recordings of single fiber responses to electric stimulation, including threshold, relative spread, jitter, and chronaxie. The model also accounts for refractory and summation effects that influence the responses of auditory nerve fibers to high pulse rate stimulation. Throughout, we compare model predictions to published physiological data and explain differences in auditory nerve responses to high and low pulse rate stimulation. We close by performing an ideal observer analysis of simulated spike trains in response to sinusoidally amplitude modulated stimuli and find that carrier pulse rate does not affect modulation detection thresholds.
The National Institutes of Healths (NIH) Human Biomolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP) aims to create a comprehensive high-resolution atlas of all the cells in the healthy human body. Multiple laboratories across the United States are collecting tissue specimens from different organs of donors who vary in sex, age, and body size. Integrating and harmonizing the data derived from these samples and mapping them into a common three-dimensional (3D) space is a major challenge. The key to making this possible is a Common Coordinate Framework (CCF), which provides a semantically annotated, 3D reference system for the entire body. The CCF enables contributors to HuBMAP to register specimens and datasets within a common spatial reference system, and it supports a standardized way to query and explore data in a spatially and semantically explicit manner. [...] This paper describes the construction and usage of a CCF for the human body and its reference implementation in HuBMAP. The CCF consists of (1) a CCF Clinical Ontology, which provides metadata about the specimen and donor (the who); (2) a CCF Semantic Ontology, which describes what part of the body a sample came from and details anatomical structures, cell types, and biomarkers (ASCT+B); and (3) a CCF Spatial Ontology, which indicates where a tissue sample is located in a 3D coordinate system. An initial version of all three CCF ontologies has been implemented for the first HuBMAP Portal release. It was successfully used by Tissue Mapping Centers to semantically annotate and spatially register 48 kidney and spleen tissue blocks. The blocks can be queried and explored in their clinical, semantic, and spatial context via the CCF user interface in the HuBMAP Portal.