Third-Order Edge Statistics: Contour Continuation, Curvature, and Cortical Connections

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26 (NIPS 2013)

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Authors

Matthew Lawlor, Steven W. Zucker

Abstract

Association field models have been used to explain human contour grouping performance and to explain the mean frequency of long-range horizontal connections across cortical columns in V1. However, association fields essentially depend on pairwise statistics of edges in natural scenes. We develop a spectral test of the sufficiency of pairwise statistics and show that there is significant higher-order structure. An analysis using a probabilistic spectral embedding reveals curvature-dependent components to the association field, and reveals a challenge for biological learning algorithms.