Neurocomputing. Vol. 11:155-170, 1996

A recurrent neural architecture mimicking
cortical preattentive vision systems.

Giacomo Indiveri, Luigi Raffo, Silvio P. Sabatini and Giacomo M. Bisio
DIBE - University of Genoa, Via Opera Pia 11a, 16145 Genova, ITALY

Low- and intermediate-level tasks of visual perception are based on
multiple and cooperating simple agent architectures, made up of
networks of formal neurons organized into a three-layer neural
network locally connected. In each layer, there is a specific intermediate
representation of the image: the first layer extracts oriented feature
elements; the second and third ones are used to control and coordinate
interactions among features.
Inter- and intra-layer recurrent connections are responsible for the
integration of the different computational tasks performed by
each neuron into a non-local percept. The output of cortical neurons also
depends on the excitation of neighboring neurons. Applications to
texture discrimination in both natural and artificial textures are presented.