Identification of salient contours in cluttered images

We present a model of contour extraction in which the perceptual salience of contours arises from long-range in-teractions between orientation-selective filters. Ullman [19], Zucker [22, 23] and colleagues have previously shown that salient contours may be extracted from noisy images by using a number of heuristic features. Our algo-rithm is based on cortical mechanisms, and simulations show close agreement with results from recent anatomical, physiological and psychophysical studies including recent results of Field et al. [3], Kovács et al. [10, 11, 12], and Kapadia et al., [8]. The performance of the algorithm is demonstrated on a range of psychophysical stimuli and real images. 1