Abstract
Figure-ground (FG) segregation is a crucial function of the intermediate-level vision. Physiological studies on monkey V2 have reported border-ownership (BO) selective cells that signal the direction of figure along a local border. However, local borders in natural images are often complicated and they often do not provide a clue for FG segregation. In the present study, we hypothesize that a population of V4 cells represents FG by means of surface rather than border. We investigated this hypothesis by the computational analysis of neural signals from multiple cells in monkey V4. Specifically, we applied Support Vector Machine as an ideal integrator to the cellular responses, and examined whether the responses carry information capable of determining correct local FG. Our results showed that the responses from several tens of cells are capable of determining correct local FG in a variety of natural image patches while single-cell responses hardly determine FG, suggesting a population coding of local FG by a small number of cells in V4.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Zhou, H., Friedman, H.S., von der Heydt, R.: Coding of border ownership in monkey visual cortex. J. Neurosci. 20, 6594–6611 (2000)
Zhang, N.R., von der Heydt, R.: Analysis of the context integration mechanisms underlying figure-ground organization in the visual cortex. J. Neurosci. 30, 6482–6496 (2010)
Sakai, K., Nishimura, H.: Surrounding suppression and facilitation in the determination of border ownership. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 18, 562–579 (2006)
Sakai, K., Nishimura, H., Shimizu, R., Kondo, K.: Consistent and robust determination of border-ownership based on asymmetric surrounding contrast. Neural Netw. 33, 257–274 (2012)
Nakata, Y., Sakai, K.: Structures of surround modulation for the border-ownership selectivity of V2 cells. In: Huang, T., Zeng, Z., Li, C., Leung, C.S. (eds.) ICONIP 2012, Part I. LNCS, vol. 7663, pp. 383–391. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Pasupathy, A., Connor, C.E.: Population coding of shape in area V4. Nat. Neurosci. 5(12), 1332–1338 (2002)
Poort, J., Raudies, F., Wanning, A., Lamme, V.A.F., Neumann, H., Roelfsema, P.R.: The role of attention in figure-ground segregation in areas V1 and V4 of the visual cortex. Neuron 75, 143–156 (2012)
Hasuike, M., Ueno, S., Minowa, D., Yamane, Y., Tamura, H., Sakai, K.: Figure-ground segregation by a population of V4 cells. In: Arik, S., et al. (eds.) ICONIP 2015. LNCS, vol. 9490, pp. 617–622. Springer, Heidelberg (2015). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-26535-3_70
Fowlkes, C.C., Martin, D.R., Malik, J.: Local figure-ground cues are valid for natural images. J. Vis. 7(8), 2, 1–9 (2007)
Berkeley Segmentation Dataset; Figure-Ground Assignments in Natural Images. http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/CS/vision/grouping/fg/
Sakai, K., Matsuoka, S., Kurematsu, K., Hatori, Y.: Perceptual representation and effectiveness of local figure-ground cues in natural contours. Front. Psychol. (2015). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01685
Chang, C.C., Lin, C.J.: LIBSVM - a library for support vector machines. http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libsvm/
Jones, H.E., Andolina, I.M., Shipp, S.D., Adams, D.L., Cudeiro, J., Salt, T.E., Sillito, A.M.: Figure-ground modulation in awake primate thalamus. PNAS 112(22), 7085–7090 (2015)
Acknowledgment
This work was supported by grant-in-aids from JSPS and MEXT of Japan (KAKENHI 26280047, 25135704 (Shitsukan)), and from RIEC of Tohoku University (H25-A09).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Hasuike, M., Yamane, Y., Tamura, H., Sakai, K. (2016). Representation of Local Figure-Ground by a Group of V4 Cells. In: Hirose, A., Ozawa, S., Doya, K., Ikeda, K., Lee, M., Liu, D. (eds) Neural Information Processing. ICONIP 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9947. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46687-3_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46687-3_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-46686-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-46687-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)