Seeking summary statistics that match peripheral visual appearance using naturalistic textures generated by Deep Neural Networks

Abstract

An important hypothesis that emerged from crowding research is that the perception of image structure in the periphery is texture-like. We investigate this hypothesis by measuring perceptual properties of a family of naturalistic textures generated using Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), a class of algorithms that can identify objects in images with near-human performance. DNNs function by stacking repeated convolutional operations in a layered feedforward hierarchy. Our group has recently shown how to generate shift-invariant textures that reproduce the statistical structure of natural images increasingly well, by matching the DNN representation at an increasing number of layers. Here, observers discriminated original photographic images from DNN-synthesised images in a spatial oddity paradigm. In this paradigm, low psychophysical performance means that the model is good at matching the appearance of the …