Contrast (vision)

Summary

Contrast is the contradiction in luminance or colour that makes an object (or its representation in an image or display) distinguishable. In visual perception of the real world, contrast is determined by the difference in the colour and brightness of the object and other objects within the same field of view. The human visual system is more sensitive to contrast than absolute luminance; we can perceive the world similarly regardless of the huge changes in illumination over the day or from place to place. The maximum contrast of an image is the contrast ratio or dynamic range. Images with a contrast ratio close to their medium's maximum possible contrast ratio experience a conservation of contrast, wherein any increase in contrast in some parts of the image must necessarily result in a decrease in contrast elsewhere. Brightening an image will increase contrast in dark areas but decrease contrast in bright areas, while darkening the image will have the opposite effect. Bleach bypass destroys contrast in both the darkest and brightest parts of an image while enhancing luminance contrast in areas of intermediate brightness. According to Campbell and Robson (1968), the human contrast sensitivity function shows a typical band-pass filter shape peaking at around 4 cycles per degree, with sensitivity dropping off either side of the peak. That finding has led many to claim that the human visual system is most sensitive in detecting contrast differences occurring at 4 cycles per degree. However, the claim of frequency sensitivity is problematic given, for example, that changes of distance do not seem to affect the relevant perceptual patterns (as noted, for example, in the figure caption to Solomon and Pelli (1994)). While the latter authors are referring specifically to letters, they make no objective distinction between these and other shapes. The relative insensitivity of contrast effects to distance (and thus spatial frequency) may also be observed by casual inspection of a paradigmatic sweep grating, as may be observed here The high-frequency cut-off represents the optical limitations of the visual system's ability to resolve detail and is typically about 60 cycles per degree.

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrast_(vision)

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Background: In many countries, primary care physicians determine whether or not older drivers are fit to drive. Little, however, is known regarding the effects of cognitive decline on driving performance and the means to detect it. This study explores to what extent the trail making test (TMT) can provide indications to clinicians about their older patients' on-road driving performance in the context of cognitive decline. Methods: This translational study was nested within a cohort study and an exploratory psychophysics study. The target population of interest was constituted of older drivers in the absence of important cognitive or physical disorders. We therefore recruited and tested 404 home-dwelling drivers, aged 70 years or more and in possession of valid drivers' licenses, who volunteered to participate in a driving refresher course. Forty-five drivers also agreed to undergo further testing at our lab. On-road driving performance was evaluated by instructors during a 45 minute validated open-road circuit. Drivers were classified as either being excellent, good, moderate, or poor depending on their score on a standardized evaluation of on-road driving performance. Results: The area under the receiver operator curve for detecting poorly performing drivers was 0.668 (CI95% 0.558 to 0.778) for the TMT-A, and 0.662 (CI95% 0.542 to 0.783) for the TMT-B. TMT was related to contrast sensitivity, motion direction, orientation discrimination, working memory, verbal fluency, and literacy. Older patients with a TMT-A = 54 seconds or a TMT-B = 150 seconds have a threefold (CI95% 1.3 to 7.0) increased risk of performing poorly during the on-road evaluation. TMT had a sensitivity of 63.6%, a specificity of 64.9%, a positive predictive value of 9.5%, and a negative predictive value of 96.9%. Conclusion: In screening settings, the TMT would have clinicians uselessly consider driving cessation in nine drivers out of ten. Given the important negative impact this could have on older drivers, this study confirms the TMT not to be specific enough for clinicians to justify driving cessation without complementary investigations on driving behaviors.

BioMed Central2014

Humans have the ability to learn. Having seen an object we can recognise it later. We can do this because our nervous system uses an efficient and robust visual processing and capabilities to learn from sensory input. On the other hand, designing algorithms to learn from visual data is a difficult task. More than fifty years ago, Rosenblatt proposed the perceptron algorithm. The perceptron learns from data examples a linear separation, which categorises the data in two classes. The algorithm served as a simple model of neuronal learning. Two further important ideas were added to the perceptron. First, to look for a maximal margin of separation. Second, to separate the data in a possibly high dimensional feature space, related nonlinearly to the initial space of the data, and allowing nonlinear separations. Important is that learning in the feature space can be performed implicitly and hence efficiently with the use of a kernel, a measure of similarity between two data points. The combination of these ideas led to the support vector machine, an efficient algorithm with high performance. In this thesis, we design an algorithm to learn the categorisation of data into multiple classes. This algorithm is applied to a real-time vision task, the recognition of human faces. Our algorithm can be seen as a generalisation of the support vector machine to multiple classes. It is shown how the algorithm can be efficiently implemented. To avoid a large number of small but time consuming updates of the variables limited accuracy computations are used. We prove a bound on the accuracy needed to find a solution. The proof motivates the use of a heuristic, which further increases efficiency. We derive a second implementation using a stochastic gradient descent method. This implementation is appealing as it has a direct interpretation and can be used in an online setting. Conceptually our approach differs from standard support vector approaches because examples can be rejected and are not necessarily attributed to one of the categories. This is natural in the context of a vision task. At any time, the sensory input can be something unseen before and hence cannot be recognised. Our visual data are images acquired with the recently developed adaptive vision sensor from CSEM. The vision sensor has two important features. First, like the human retina, it is locally adaptive to light intensity. Hence, the sensor has a high dynamic range. Second, the image gradient is computed on the sensor chip and is thus available directly from the sensor in real time. The sensor output is time encoded. The information about a strong local contrast is transmitted rst and the weakest contrast information at the end. To recognise faces, possibly moving in front of the camera, the sensor images have to be processed in a robust way. Representing images to exhibit local invariances is a common yet unsolved problem in computer vision. We develop the following representation of the sensor output. The image gradient information is decomposed into local histograms over contrast intensity. The histograms are local in position and direction of the gradient. Hence, the representation has local invariance properties to translation, rotation, and scaling. The histograms can be efficiently computed because the sensor output is already ordered with respect to the local contrast. Our support vector approach for multicategorical data uses the local histogram features to learn the recognition of faces. As recognition is time consuming, a face detection stage is used beforehand. We learn the detection features in an unsupervised manner using a specially designed optimisation procedure. The combined system to detect and recognise faces of a small group of individuals is efficient, robust, and reliable.

EPFL2003

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