A Texture Analysis/Synthesis Model of Visual Crowding

描述（由申请人提供）：识别视觉刺激可能会因附近存在额外刺激而受到严重损害。这种现象被称为“拥挤”，它在许多情况下强烈限制了视觉感知，特别是在周边视野中。有大量的文献详细描述了拥挤现象，但我们不知道为什么会发生拥挤。我们缺乏一个计算模型，可以预测什么信息将提供给观察者在一个任意拥挤的显示。一个流行的假设是，拥挤的结果是强制性的“纹理处理”，但很少有努力正式化和测试这可能意味着什么，尽管广泛同意，拥挤反映了某种形式的“过度整合”。Rosenholtz博士在纹理处理的计算模型方面拥有丰富的经验，这是定义“纹理处理”的确切性质并测试此类模型解释和预测视觉行为的能力的强大手段。该研究有3个目的：（1）澄清和形式化的假设，拥挤是由于一个“纹理”-即统计-表示拥挤的刺激。(2)从更广泛的展示和任务中收集行为数据，而不是通常在拥挤中研究。(3)开发并验证第一个通用的视觉拥挤模型。为了实现这些目标，Rosenholtz博士将应用最先进的纹理合成计算工具，以“拥挤”的刺激。“纹理化”拥挤的刺激阵列提供了一种工具，用于可视化拥挤显示器中可用的信息和用于描述其代表性内容的词汇表。因此，Rosenholtz博士将通过计算机图形学、计算机视觉和心理物理学的有用综合来解决拥挤问题。公共卫生相关性：除了阐明正常人类视觉的表征和表现之外，理解拥挤对于年龄相关性黄斑变性等疾病至关重要，对于这种疾病，没有中央凹视觉，几乎所有的感知都是拥挤的。此外，拥挤下的知觉可能与其他视觉功能障碍下的知觉有关，这些视觉功能障碍存在“过度整合”，如弱视和同时感觉缺失。成功地预测拥挤的严重程度也将推进老年人低视力辅助设备的设计，并提高我们为视力受损者设计的能力。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Identifying a visual stimulus can be substantially impaired by the mere presence of additional stimuli in the immediate vicinity. This phenomenon is called "crowding," and it powerfully limits visual perception in many circumstances, especially in the peripheral visual field. There is a rich body of literature detailing the phenomenology of crowding, but we do not know why crowding occurs. We lack a computational model that can predict what information will be available to an observer in an arbitrary crowded display. A popular hypothesis is that crowding results from obligatory "texture processing," but there have been few efforts to formalize and test what this might mean, despite broad agreement that crowding reflects some form of "excessive integration." Dr. Rosenholtz has extensive experience with computational models of texture processing, which are a powerful means of defining the exact nature of "texture processing" and testing the ability of such models to explain and predict visual behavior. The proposed research has 3 aims: (1) To clarify and formalize the hypothesis that crowding is due to a "texture" - i.e. statistical -- representation of the crowded stimuli. (2) To collect behavioral data from a wider variety of displays and tasks than is typically studied in crowding. (3) To develop and validate the first general-purpose model of visual crowding. To achieve these aims, Dr. Rosenholtz will apply state-of-the-art computational tools for texture synthesis to "crowded" stimuli. "Texturizing" crowded arrays of stimuli affords a tool for visualizing the information available in a crowded display and a vocabulary for describing its representational content. Thus, Dr. Rosenholtz will attack the problem of crowding through a useful synthesis of computer graphics, computer vision, and psychophysics. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Understanding crowding, besides elucidating representations and performance of normal human vision, is crucial for disorders like age-related macular degeneration, for which, without foveal vision, virtually all perception is essentially crowded. In addition, percepts under crowding may be related to percepts under other visual dysfunctions where there is "excessive integration", such as amblyopia and simultagnosia. Successfully predicting crowding severity would also advance the design of low-vision aids for older adults and improve our ability to design for the visually-impaired.