Orientation Disparity: A Cue for 3D Orientation?

Orientation disparity, the difference in orientation that results when a texture element on a slanted surface is projected to the two eyes, has been proposed as a binocular cue for 3D orientation. Since orientation disparity is confounded with position disparity, neither behavioral nor neurophysiological experiments have successfully isolated its contribution to slant estimates or established whether the visual system uses it. Using a modified disparity energy model, we simulated a population of binocular visual cortical neurons tuned to orientation disparity and measured the amount of Fisher information contained in the activity patterns. We evaluated the potential contribution of orientation disparity to 3D orientation estimation and delimited the stimulus conditions under which it is a reliable cue. Our results suggest that orientation disparity is an efficient source of information about 3D orientation and that it is plausible that the visual system could have mechanisms that are sensitive to it. Although orientation disparity is neither necessary nor sufficient for estimating slant, it appears that it could be useful when combined with estimates from position disparity gradients and monocular perspective cues.

[1]  M. Landy,et al.  Why Is Spatial Stereoresolution So Low? , 2004, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[2]  Dale Purves,et al.  Image/source statistics of surfaces in natural scenes , 2003, Network.

[3]  Richard O. Duda,et al.  Pattern classification and scene analysis , 1974, A Wiley-Interscience publication.

[4]  A. Parker,et al.  Receptive Field Size in V1 Neurons Limits Acuity for Perceiving Disparity Modulation , 2004, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[5]  R. Shapley,et al.  The relatively small decline in orientation acuity as stimulus size decreases , 2001, Vision Research.

[6]  B. Rogers,et al.  Anisotropies in the perception of stereoscopic surfaces: The role of orientation disparity , 1993, Vision Research.

[7]  B G Cumming,et al.  Responses of Macaque V1 Neurons to Binocular Orientation Differences , 2001, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[8]  B Gillam,et al.  Orientation Disparity, Deformation, and Stereoscopic Slant Perception , 1991, Perception.

[9]  R. Heydt,et al.  THE ROLE OF ORIENTATION DISPARITY IN STEREOSCOPIC PERCEPTION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF BINOCULAR CORRESPONDENCE , 1981 .

[10]  Jenny C. A. Read,et al.  A Bayesian Approach to the Stereo Correspondence Problem , 2002, Neural Computation.

[11]  Pascal Mamassian,et al.  Common mechanisms for 2D tilt and 3D slant after-effects , 2002, Vision Research.

[12]  J. Ninio.  Orientational versus Horizontal Disparity in the Stereoscopic Appreciation of Slant , 1985, Perception.

[13]  C. Blakemore,et al.  A second neural mechanism of binocular depth discrimination , 1972, The Journal of physiology.

[14]  P. Stumpf.  A gem from the past: Pleikart Stumpf's (1911) anticipation of the aperture problem, Reichardt detectors, and perceived motion loss at equiluminance. , 1996, Perception.

[15]  Hal S. Greenwald,et al.  Cue integration outside central fixation: a study of grasping in depth. , 2009, Journal of vision.

[16]  Jitendra Malik,et al.  Determining Three-Dimensional Shape from Orientation and Spatial Frequency Disparities , 1991, ECCV.

[17]  D. Snodderly,et al.  High response reliability of neurons in primary visual cortex (V1) of alert, trained monkeys. , 2006, Cerebral cortex.

[18]  B. Julesz,et al.  A disparity gradient limit for binocular fusion. , 1980, Science.

[19]  Ning Qian,et al.  A Coarse-to-Fine Disparity Energy Model with Both Phase-Shift and Position-Shift Receptive Field Mechanisms , 2004, Neural Computation.

[20]  M. Hestenes,et al.  Methods of conjugate gradients for solving linear systems , 1952 .

[21]  J. Koenderink,et al.  Geometry of binocular vision and a model for stereopsis , 2004, Biological Cybernetics.

[22]  D. W. Heeley,et al.  Interocular orientation disparity and the stereoscopic perception of slanted surfaces. , 2003, Spatial vision.

[23]  James M. Hillis,et al.  Slant from texture and disparity cues: optimal cue combination. , 2004, Journal of vision.

[24]  H. Sakata,et al.  Parietal neurons represent surface orientation from the gradient of binocular disparity. , 2000, Journal of neurophysiology.

[25]  Andrew P. Witkin,et al.  Recovering Surface Shape and Orientation from Texture , 1981, Artif. Intell..

[26]  A. Parker,et al.  Modeling V1 neuronal responses to orientation disparity , 2001, Visual Neuroscience.

[27]  C. WILLIAM TYLER,et al.  Depth perception in disparity gratings , 1974, Nature.

[28]  G. Orban,et al.  Human orientation discrimination tested with long stimuli , 1984, Vision Research.

[29]  Hermann Wagner,et al.  Visual depth encoding in populations of neurons with localized receptive fields , 2002, Biological Cybernetics.

[30]  R. Gurnsey,et al.  Orientation discrimination across the visual field: matching perceived contrast near threshold , 2004, Vision Research.

[31]  I. Ohzawa,et al.  Stereoscopic depth discrimination in the visual cortex: neurons ideally suited as disparity detectors. , 1990, Science.

[32]  Barbara Gillam,et al.  Perspective, Orientation Disparity, and Anisotropy in Stereoscopic Slant Perception , 1992, Perception.

[33]  J. Saunders,et al.  Do humans optimally integrate stereo and texture information for judgments of surface slant? , 2003, Vision Research.

[34]  Kent A. Stevens,et al.  Slant-tilt: The visual encoding of surface orientation , 1983, Biological Cybernetics.