Collinearity and Parallelism are Statistically Significant Second-Order Relations of Complex Cell Responses

By investigating the second-order statistics of Gabor wavelet responses derived from natural images, we show that collinearity and parallelism are conspicuous relations. We give a precise mathematical characterization of these Gestalt principles by the conditional probability of two responses. Essential for our investigations is a non-linear transformation, initially utilized within the object recognition system [5], which transforms continuous Gabor wavelet responses into a binary code indicating the presence or absence of local oriented line segments.