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Salient contour detection on the basis of the mechanism of bilateral asymmetric receptive fields

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Abstract

Salient contour detection is the key step of visual perception and is very important for visual detection and object recognition. In this paper, a new contour detection method, which is based on the bilateral asymmetric receptive field mechanism of the visual pathway, is proposed. First, the classical receptive field of primary visual cortex neurons was simulated, and the 2D Gaussian derivative was used to detect the primary contour response of the input image. Then, the asymmetric receptive field structure was introduced to enhance the contrast difference in local regions. Assuming that unilateral asymmetric receptive fields will suppress the intensity imbalance of the primary contour in the image, the strategy of weight information fusion, which is based on the bilateral asymmetric receptive field multi-scale inhibition, was proposed. Finally, texture suppression was performed with varying intensity in the local regions of the primary contour in the image, and the salient contour was detected. The salient contour detection method, which is based on bilateral asymmetric receptive fields proposed in this study, provides new ideas for the subsequent image understanding and analysis that are on the basis of the visual mechanism.

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Acknowledgements

The work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61501154).

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  1. Laboratory of Pattern Recognition and Image Processing, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou, 310018, China

    Tao Fang, Yingle Fan & Wei Wu

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  1. Tao Fang
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  2. Yingle Fan
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  3. Wei Wu
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Correspondence to Yingle Fan.

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Fang, T., Fan, Y. & Wu, W. Salient contour detection on the basis of the mechanism of bilateral asymmetric receptive fields. SIViP 14, 1461–1469 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-020-01689-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-020-01689-1

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