Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 6 (NIPS 1993)
G. Buracas, T. Albright
The goal of this work was to investigate the role of primate MT neurons in solving the structure from motion (SFM) problem. Three types of receptive field (RF) surrounds found in area MT neurons (K.Tanaka et al.,1986; Allman et al.,1985) correspond, as our analysis suggests, to the oth, pt and 2nd order fuzzy space-differential operators. The large surround/center both differentiation of smooth velocity fields and discontinuity detection at boundaries of objects. The model is in agreement with recent psychophysical data on surface interpolation involvement in SFM. We suggest that area MT partially segregates information about object shape from information about spatial relations necessary for navigation and manipulation.