A mechanism for extracting optical virtual contours of discrete dot stimuli

Abstract

This study proposed a novel mechanism that can extract optical virtual contours from dot stimuli referenced on visual system. In this experiment we deal with optical virtual contours from simple arrays of discrete dot figures as well as virtual regular polygon contours that include dots positioned on the vertices of imaginary regular polygon. It is well known that some simple arrays of discrete dots can perceive as successive virtual lines. In this paper we proposed a visual mechanism that predicts the shape of virtual polygon contours. This system employs an important six-stage process: image acquisition, contrast extraction, simple virtual stimuli extraction, virtual stimuli restoration, virtual contour extraction and image smoothing process. The proposed system is demonstrated on a variety of array-type and polygon-type dot stimuli displays. The results of the experiment showed that the proposed model was successful not only in extracting the successive virtual lines between dots, but also in extracting the virtual polygon contours from dot stimuli. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.