Developmental stereo: Topographic Iconic-abstract map from top-down connection

Abstract

Engineering approaches to stereo typically use explicit search for the best matching between left and right sub-windows, which involves a high cost of search and unstable performance in the presence of binocular inconsistency and weak texture. The brain does not seem to conduct explicit search in the V1 and V2 cortex. But the mechanisms that the brain employs to integrate binocular disparity into 3-D perception is still largely a mystery. The work presented in this paper focuses on an important issue of integrated stereo: How the same cortex can perform recognition and perception by generating a topographic disparity-tuning map using top-down connections. As top-down connections with object-class supervisory signals result in topographic class maps, the model presented here clarifies that stereo can be processed by a unified in-place learning framework in the neural layers, and can generate iconic-abstract internal representation. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.