Séminaire McTAO : Luca Calatroni (CNRS, UCA)

Disclosing visual illusions via Wilson-Cowan-type dynamics

Luca Calatroni (CNRS, I3S, UCA, Inria Morpheme)

Jeudi 16 décembre 2021, 11:00, salle Byron blanc

Abstract. In this talk, I will discuss the reproduction of visual perception phenomena, specifically visual illusions, by means of Wilson-Cowan-type models of neuronal dynamics. In particular, we show that the celebrated Wilson-Cowan equations can reproduce a number of brightness and orientation-dependent illusions, and that the latter type of illusions require that the neuronal dynamics equations to consider explicitly the orientation, coherently with the architecture of V1, by means of a suitable lifting procedure. I’ll then focus on a slightly different modification of the Wilson-Cowan equations which makes such model consistent with the efficient representation principle, that is it can be interpreted as the gradient flow of a suitable functional. This shows that this model minimises redundant information, making it capable of replicating more visual illusions than the original Wilson-Cowan formulation.

This is joint work with D. Prandi (CNRS, L2S, France), V. Franceschi (University of Padua, Italy), M. Bertalmio (CSIC, Spain), A. Gomez-Villa (UPF, Spain) and Emre Baspinar (NeuroPSI, France).