Physics 1230: Light and Color

Patterns and Motion perceived by the Eye

Temporal response and afterimages Patterns or spatial frequency Motion Channels

http://www.colorado.edu/physics/phys1230

Your RETINA is wired to enhance edges!!

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/optics/lightandcolor/vision.html

CENTER-SURROUND OF GANGLION CELLS

When light strikes any of the rods/ cones in the center of the receptive field, the ganglion is excited (++)

When light strikes any of the rods/ cones in the surround, the ganglion is inhibited (--)

++++++ ++++++ +++

RESPONSE OF EYE DEPENDS ON THE PATTERN OF THE LIGHT

RESPONSE OF EYE DEPENDS ON THE PATTERN OF THE LIGHT

(a) When a uniform gray area is imaged on the receptive field, a small background response occurs (b) When bright light is imaged on the center of the receptive field, a large response occurs (c) When bright light is imaged on the surround of the receptive field, the response is decreased below background (d) When bright light is imaged on the center and surround of the receptive field, a small background response occurs - excitation and inhibition balance (e) When bright bars are imaged on the center and surround of the receptive field, a very large response occurs - the dark bars reduce inhibition (e) When closely spaced bars are imaged on the center and surround of the receptive field, a small background response occurs - there is no net excitation or inhibition

Stabilization causes fading

Look at the upper right figure.This experiment works better if you close one eye. Fixate on the black dot in the center for about 10 - 15 seconds. Pay close attention to what you see. Now do the same thing with the upper left figure. Did you notice any difference?

http://www.yorku.ca/eye/toc-sub.htm

Stabilized fading explained

The visual system does not like steady state stimulation. There is sophisticated apparatus that allows you to view a stimulus in such a way as to nullify your natural eye movements so that the image of the stimulus remains on exactly the same part of the retina as if there were no eye movements. Such apparatus is called a stabilized image system. Now to the disappearing disk. Most people would see the smudge in the upper left disappear as they stared at the black dot. Most people would not see the smudge disappear in the upper right. In the upper left, the darker area slowly becomes lighter as one moves away from the black dot. This gradual change from black to white is a poor stimulus for sustaining visual perception. However, if you allow your eyes to freely move over the stimulus the perception of it will be sustained. When you fixate on the black dot and try and hold your gaze as steady as possible the smudge should fade away and the color of the background would predominate. The upper right figure is exactly the same as the upper left except for the dark gray ring. This dark gray ring is sufficient to keep the stimulus "alive" no matter how hard you stare.

Stabilized fading explained

When you fixate the black dot and try to hold your gaze as steady as possible, your eyes are still in constant motion. True, many of these eye movements are very tiny tremors as opposed to the large saccades or pursuit eye movements we make. Nevertheless these small tremors can keep a stimulus "alive". When the stimulus is one as in the upper left where there is a very gradual change from gray to white, the change in stimulation is so slight as to approach that encountered by the steady state condition of a stabilized image. As a result the image fades. You will undoubtedly have noticed that even when you fixated the upper left field and the smudge disappeared, it would spontaneously reappear and then again fade. It reappeared because you made a large enough eye movement. When you stare at a white piece of paper, the center of your view is effectively retinally stabilized. Even when your eye moves slightly, it still sees white paper. However, the white does not fade at the center because of EDGES. Your brain receives the information about the edges of the paper, and your brain fills in (much as it does for your blind spot).

Negative Afterimages
The sensitivity of a given region of your retina decreases after it is exposed to a bright light for a period of time. This is called successive lightness contrast. Prolonged stimulation adapts (or desensitizes) part of your retina, so that it has a weaker response to subsequent stimulation. Stare at the black dot on the left for some time - then look at the dot on the right. What do you see?

Negative Afterimages
During the period of adaptation to the cat, parts of your retina are overexposed and become desensitized. But the parts of your retina outside the cat are not desensitized. So when you look at the white region on the right, you see a dark cat on a white background. As you move your eyes around, the afterimage should move also - to correspond to the desensitized region of your retina. (for about 30 seconds or so). Rapid blinking should get rid of the afterimage faster!

Eye movements and Afterimages

Small, involuntary, eye movements cause the image to be scanned on your retina. If you look at the figures below in your text (Fig. 7.17 and 7.18), it will appear to shimmer no matter how hard you try to prevent your eye from moving. In the figure on the right, as you eye scans, image and afterimage superimpose, to give a ripple effect. In the figure on the left, depending on how your eye moves, some of the afterimages coincide with the figure itself, and some do not. So only some areas shimmer at any one time.

Temporal Response - Positive Afterimages

Your retina responds only if there is a change in stimulation with time (light turning on and off, eye scanning across an edge) The response of your visual system to a brief flash is both delayed (latency), and of longer duration (persistence) than the flash itself. Positive afterimages allow us to see the flash after it is over (white where there was white, black where there was black) These afterimages can last as long as 1/20 seconds at low ambient light levels, but are shorter at high light levels. The duration of afterimages can be extended by sensitizing your eyes beforehand by closing and covering them.

Extending the Duration of Positive Afterimages

Face a window through which bright sky is visible. Close and cover your eyes for 30 seconds. Then take your hands away for 3 seconds, looking at the intersection of the bars of the windows against the bright sky. Look at one point for all 3 seconds. Then close and cover your eyes again. Time the duration of the positive afterimage. Closing and covering your eyes increases their sensitivity. Returning them to the dark increases their persistence time, so you can observe the afterimage for longer.

MOVIES AND TV

For TV, a sequence of images is presented - in the US at one frame every 1/30 sec The persistence of vision can be as short as 1/50 seconds, so you might expect that the screen might flicker. This problem is avoided by scanning the horizontal lines in the TV in order 1,3,5,7.. and 2,4,6,8so that two frames, each covering the screen, are interleaved. The refresh is thus every 1/60 seconds, so that flicker is avoided. Movie frames are projected at 1/24 seconds, but a special shutter in the projector shows each frame 3 times. So the rate is 72 per second, and flicker is avoided. Older projects did not have the special shutter, so the image sometimes flickered hence the name the flicks. On smaller computer monitors (<14") few people notice any discomfort below 6072Hz refresh rates. On larger monitors (>17") most people would experience mild discomfort unless the refresh is set to a more comfortable 85Hz or higher. 100Hz is comfortable for almost any size

FRAME RATE and REFRESH RATE

The refresh rate (most commonly the "vertical refresh rate", "vertical scan rate" for CRTs) is the number of times in a second that display hardware (re)draws the data it is being given. This is distinct from the measure of frame rate in that the refresh rate includes the repeated drawing of identical frames, while frame rate measures how a video source can feed an entire frame of new data to a display. For example, most movie projectors advance from one frame to the next 24 times each second. But each frame is illuminated twice or three times before the next frame is projected using a shutter in front of its lamp. As a result, the movie projector runs at 24 frames per second, but has a 48 or 72 Hz refresh rate. On CRT displays, increasing the refresh rate decreases flickering, thereby reducing eye strain.

Early movies - Zoetropes

The zoetrope is one of several animation toys which were invented in the 19th century, as people attempted to invent ways to make moving pictures. The zoetrope appeared first in England in 1834, then France in 1860, and finally the United States in 1867.

High Speed Photography

How might these photographs be taken?

Freezing motion: high-speed photography (msec)

Eadweard Muybridge The Galloping Horse Portfolio, 1887

http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/muybridge_eadweard.html

Stroboscopic photography (sec)

.30 Bullet Piercing an Apple, 1964. A microsecond exposure of a bullet travelling 2800 feet per second. George Eastman House collection www.geh.org

Stroboscopic photography
With the advent of the electronic flash and the electronic stroboscope, and primarily under the guidance of Harold Edgerton from the 1930's through the 1980's, the recording of subjects in motion onto film (either stationary or moving) became almost the exclusive domain of electronic stroboscopes.

Modern photographic stroboscopy in its simplest form is a method whereby a subject in motion is lit by repeating flashes of light from the stroboscope while the shutter of the camera remains open for a period of time long enough to capture the subject in multiple locations during the time of exposure.

http://www.rit.edu/~andpph/text-figures/strobe-schifley-1.jpg

Stroboscopic photography

Concept Question - Stroboscopic photography

How was this photo taken? A. Patching many individual stroboscopic photos together B. Leaving the shutter open and flashing the strobe light many times C. Leaving the shutter open and the lights on

The visual pathway

In the diagram, we can see that the analyses of objects in three dimension is based on the retinal disparity between the images formed in the left and the right eye. Our brain must perform a great deal of computations to give us an interpretation which seems so evident to us at first sight. In humans, it is important for binocular stereoscopic depth perception that each of the possibly two retinal images of a visual field be mapped onto the same region of the brain.

http://ligwww.epfl.ch/~fua/vision/3/misc/exam/human/2/

Perception of Motion

Assume that while you are staring at the bird, a racing car zooms by. The image of the car will travel across your retina as indicated by the dotted line with the arrow. This image movement will cause you to say that the car moves from your right to your left.

http://www.yorku.ca/eye/toc-sub.htm

Perception of Motion
This time you are following the car by moving your eyes from right to left. Just as before, your percept is that of the car moving from right to left. This is true even though the image remains on the fovea during the motion of the car and your eyes.

http://www.yorku.ca/eye/toc-sub.htm

Perception of Motion
This illustration shows that another way to follow the racing car is to keep the eyes steady and to move just the head. This causes the image to project to exactly the same retinal location at each instant (assuming you move your head at precisely the correct angular velocity) as the car moves from right to left. Once again, the perception is of the car moving from right to left. This perception will be the same as the two previous illustrations. How the brain distinguishes these different ways of following moving objects is the subject of much research. These illustrations are gross simplifications. In point of fact, when we follow moving objects we use various combinations of head and eye movements.

http://www.yorku.ca/eye/toc-sub.htm

Motion Blindness
The patient had great difficulty pouring coffee into a cup. She could clearly see the cup's shape, color, and position on the table, she told her doctor. She was able to pour the coffee from the pot. But the column of fluid flowing from the spout appeared frozen, like a waterfall turned to ice. She could not see its motion. So the coffee would rise in the cup and spill over the sides. More dangerous problems arose when she went outdoors. She could not cross a street, for instance, because the motion of cars was invisible to her: a car was up the street and then upon her, without ever seeming to occupy the intervening space. Even people milling through a room made her feel very uneasy, she complained to Josef Zihl, a neuropsychologist who saw her at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, Germany, in 1980, because "the people were suddenly here or there but I did not see them moving." The woman's rare motion blindness resulted from a stroke that damaged selected areas of her brain. What she lostthe ability to see objects move through spaceis a key aspect of vision. In animals, this ability is crucial to survival: Both predators and their prey depend upon being able to detect motion rapidly. In fact, frogs and some other simple vertebrates may not even see an object unless it is moving.

Motion Blindness
While the retina of frogs can detect movement, the retina of humans and other primates cannot. "The dumber the animal, the smarter its retina," observes Denis Baylor of Stanford Medical School. The large, versatile brain of humans takes over the job, analyzing motion through a highly specialized pathway of neural connections. This is the pathway that was damaged in the motion-blind patient from Munich. Compared to the complex ensemble of regions in the visual cortex that are devoted to perceiving color and form, this motion-perception pathway seems relatively streamlined and simple. More than any other part of the cortex, it has yielded to efforts to unveil "the precise relationship between perception and the activity of a sensory neuron somewhere in the brain," says Anthony Movshon, an HHMI investigator at New York University.

Motion Blindness
Consider what happens when we watch a movie, suggests Thomas Albright of the Salk Institute. Each of the 24 frames projected per second on the theater screen is a still photograph; nothing in a movie truly moves. The illusion of movement is created by the motion-processing system, which automatically fuses, for instance, the images of legs that shift position slightly from frame to frame into the appearance of a walking actor. The Munich patient is unable to perform this fusion. In life or in the movie theater, she sees the world as a series of stills. "The motion system must match up image elements from frame to frame, over space and time," says Albright. "It has to detect which direction a hand is moving in, for instance, and not confuse that hand with a head when it waves in front of someone's face."

Motion After-effects Reverse Spoke Illusion

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/mot_spokes/index.html

Spatial Frequencies

http://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/local-uq/py255/jack/2B/sld004.htm

Contrast Sensitivity Function

Measure your CSF - the envelope of the visible part of the figure marks your CSF. The horizontal axis is spatial frequency, and the vertical axis is grating or contrast. Our eyes are not sensitive to very low or very high spatial frequencies, or to very low contrast.

http://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/local-uq/py255/jack/2B/sld006.htm

Channels - Spatial frequency adaptation

1. Look at the two gratings on the right side of the figure. Do you see any differences between them? 2. Now for about 60 seconds scan your gaze back and forth along the horizontal red bar between the two gratings on the left. 3. When you are finished scanning back and forth along the horizontal red bar, fixate on the short red bar between the gratings on the right. 4. What differences do you see between these two gratings on the right compared to the first time you looked at these gratings?

Spatial frequency adaptation

The two gratings on the right, when you looked at them the first time, undoubtedly appeared identical. When you scanned the red bar between the two gratings on the left you allowed your visual system to adapt to these gratings, while avoiding standard afterimages by moving your eye. The adaptation was not the same for the top and bottom grating because they differ in spatial frequency. The one on the bottom has a higher spatial frequency than the one on top. Then, after adapting to the gratings on the left for approximately 60 seconds, the ones on the right (if viewed while fixating between them on the red square) probably no longer appear identical. This non-identity will not last long. Current conventional wisdom to understand this is based on spatial frequency channels.

Spatial frequency adaptation

The analogous experiment involving orientation can be done using slanted gratings.

SPATIAL FREQUENCY ADAPTATION

The five test gratings on the left each has a low contrast, so they are barely visible. Adapt to a high-contrast grating on the right by allowing your eye to move around inside one of the circles. After 5 seconds, look at the five gratings on the left. What do you see? The test grating having the same spatial frequency as the one you adapted to becomes invisible, while the others remain visible.

HUMAN CSF ADAPTATION

If you try to desensitize the mechanisms that respond to gratings or spatial frequencies, you find that after adapting to a grating of a certain period, your sensitivity is lowered only for spatial frequencies near the adaptation grating.

The normal CSF is shown as a solid line. The CSF after prolonged adaptation to previous images is shown as a dotted line.

Channels
We describe CSF and similar effects by saying that adaptation to different spatial frequency gratings desensitizes different channels. A channel is a subsystem of the visual system that responds preferentially to one type of stimulus rather than another. It is an abstraction by your visual system of some attribute of the stimulus. There are channels associated with low, medium and high spatial frequencies. These channels naturally result from the center-surround receptive field, because different size receptive fields will respond best to different spatial frequencies.

Simultaneous Size Contrast adaptation by Tilt Channels

How are the center gratings oriented in each figure? So we have channels that adapt to whether a set of stripes is tilted or not!

Tilt Channels

(a) Vertical tilt channel

(b) 45 degree tilt channel

A 45 degree grating of the right spatial frequency will excite the 45 degree tilt channel but not the vertical tilt channel.

Other Channels - the Waterfall Illusion

Motion Channels: When you look out the window of a moving train, that then stops at a station, what happens? Answer: The platform appears to drift forward slowly. Example: The Waterfall Illusion is another name for the motion aftereffect. The motion aftereffect refers to the modification of motion perception following prolonged observation of a regularly moving stimulus. Typically the motion aftereffect involves the apparent motion of a stationary stimulus in the opposite direction to a previously observed one, but it can also result in a change in the apparent velocity of a moving stimulus. Explanation: It is still a matter of debate how and why the waterfall illusion happens. The motion sensors for the opposite directions are compared to give a final output (motion opponency). Normally the outputs of these sensors are balanced when looking at a stationary scene, but adaptation to a motion in one direction leads to a decrease of output in that direction, which results in a unbalance of outputs and an illusory movement in the other direction. The decrease of the output may be simply due to fatigue, but recently it is considered as a kind of more active calibration. Why?: * * * Re-calibration of 'stationary' signals Maximization of the processing effectiveness with limited sensor capacities Error correction?

OTHER CHANNELS
LOOMING CHANNELS: The world appears to rush toward you when jogging or driving. What happens when you stop? ANS: The world appears to recede slowly. Adaptation to looming channels can cause traffic accidents! If, after driving for a long time at high speed on a freeway, you slow down to exit, the intermediate speed seems slower (and safer) than it actually is!!!!

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/mot_adapt/index.html http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/mot_adaptSpiral/index.html

more Illusions the Ouchi Illusion

Move your eyes around the image. Does the circular middle section appear to separate from the rest of the figure? Does it appear to be at a different depth and even move? The Ouchi Illusion is not well understood. The illusionary motion and perceived depth may arise from the ambiguity formed at the circular contour with the adjoining vertical edges.
http://www.illusionworks.com/html/ouchi_illusion.html

Caf Wall Illusion

see animation from IllusionWorks website and http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/ang_cafewall/index.html

CAF WALL ILLUSION

Comment. This illusion demonstrates the effect of some simple image processing occurring at the retina combined with some complex processing in the cortical cells of the striate cortex. The incoming image is first filtered by the center-surround operator of the retina. The apparent tilt of the mortar lines is caused by orientation-sensitive simple cells in the striate cortex. The cells interact with one another to interpret the diagonal bands produced by the retina as a single continuous line, tilted in the direction of the diagonal bands.

the original caf in Bristol

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/ang_cafewall/index.html

Hering ILLUSION

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/ang_hering/index.html

Rotating Snake Illusion

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/ang_hering/index.html