Monday, September 17, 2012

1209.3277 (Joel Zylberberg et al.)

Dead leaves and the dirty ground: low-level image statistics in
transmissive and occlusive imaging environments
   [PDF]

Joel Zylberberg, David Pfau, Michael Robert DeWeese
The opacity of typical objects in the world results in occlusion --- an important property of natural scenes that makes inference of the full 3-dimensional structure of the world challenging. The relationship between occlusion and low-level image statistics has been hotly debated in the literature, and extensive simulations have been used to determine whether occlusion is responsible for the ubiquitously observed power-law power spectra of natural images. To deepen our understanding of this problem, we have analytically computed the 2- and 4-point functions of a generalized "dead leaves" model of natural images with parameterized object transparency. Surprisingly, transparency alters these functions only by a multiplicative constant, so long as object diameters follow a power law distribution. For other object size distributions, transparency more substantially affects the low-level image statistics. We propose that the universality of power law power spectra for both natural scenes and radiological medical images -- formed by the transmission of x-rays through partially transparent tissue -- stems from power law object size distributions, independent of object opacity.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.3277

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