Interactions of Center-On and Center-Off Receptive Field Operators: The potential role in holistic perception from computational perspective

Holistic perception is a visual behavior of crucial importance exhibited by human visual system, referring to its capability of capturing individual visual targets appearing in the visual field in their own integrities, be they ever seen before or not. What the underlying mechanisms are and how they work along visual pathways are still problems largely unresolved, which receive a great deal of attention in various fields of vision research such as neurophysiology, psychophysics and computer vision, etc. In this paper, via emulating the behaviors of ganglion cells (in the retinas of our eyes) of center-on and center-off receptive fields, the authors would like to show that, from computational perspective, the interactions between both types of receptive fields may play a role that is partially contributory to holistic visual perception: as indicated by many test cases of ours wherein such visual targets as animals in the wild and human faces are holistically picked up, without the use of models of animal shapes and of human face.