Biological Information Technology & Systems - BITS: Fixational Eye Movements in Biological and Artificial Vision Systems

Trustees Of Boston University, Boston

Investigators

Abstract

EIA-0130851 Rucci, Michele Boston Univ. BITS: Fixational eye movements in biological and artificial vision systems Summary The proposed research project has two goals: (1) to determine the specific contributions of small eye movements to the representation of visual information in the brain, and (2) to export such mechanisms to machine vision systems. To accomplish these goals, this project will integrate computer modeling of neural populations, robotic experiments and psychophysical experiments with human subjects to analyze the statistical structure of neural activity under natural viewing conditions. The proposed research will first characterize the influences of eye movements on the spatial selectivity of thalamic and cortical cells during natural viewing conditions. Then, the activity dynamics of neuronal ensembles will be studied, both in terms of efficiency of visual representation and in relation to the results of psychophysical studies on the hierarchical structure of spatial visual processing. Finally, we will analyze the possible involvement of small eye movements in the recovery of distance information during binocular free-viewing of a 3D scene. Studies will be conducted with the dual purposes of providing new insights on the brain and considering possible applications to machine vision systems.