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”，它在许多情况下严重限制了视觉感知，特别是在周边视野中。有大量的文献详细描述了拥挤现象，但我们不知道拥挤发生的原因。我们缺乏一种计算模型，可以预测在任意拥挤的显示器中观察者可以获得哪些信息。一个流行的假设是拥挤是强制性的“纹理处理”的结果，但是很少有人努力将这可能意味着什么形式化和测试，尽管人们普遍认为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”的确切性质和测试这些模型解释和预测视觉行为的能力的有力手段。提出的研究有三个目的：(1)澄清和形式化拥挤是由于拥挤刺激的“纹理”（即统计）表示的假设。(2)从更广泛的展示和任务中收集行为数据，而不是在拥挤中进行典型的研究。(3)开发并验证了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计算工具对“拥挤”刺激进行纹理合成。“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中可用的信息，以及用于描述其代表性内容的词汇。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效综合来解决拥挤问题。公共卫生相关性：理解拥挤，除了阐明正常人类视觉的表现和表现外，对于年龄相关性黄斑变性等疾病至关重要，对于这种疾病，没有中央凹视力，几乎所有的感知基本上都是拥挤的。此外，拥挤状态下的感知可能与其他存在“过度整合”的视觉功能障碍（如弱视和拟视失视）下的感知有关。成功预测拥挤程度也将推动老年人低视力辅助设备的设计，并提高我们为视障人士设计的能力。

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.