Yeshurun Y, Schwartz E L
Department of Computer Science, School of Mathematics, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Israel.
Biol Cybern. 1999 Feb;80(2):117-29. doi: 10.1007/s004220050510.
The size of a pair of cortical ocular dominance columns determines a basic anatomical module of V-1 which Hubel and Wiesel have termed the hypercolumn. Does this correspond to a basic functional, or psychophysically measurable, module as well? This is the basic question addressed in the present paper. Since the ocular dominance column architecture is presumed to be related to stereo vision, it is natural to assume that hypercolumn size should provide a modular basis for basic phenomena of stereopsis. In previous work, we have suggested that local nonlinear filtering via the cepstral transform, operating on a local window of cortical tissue scaled by hypercolumn size, provides such a modular model of stereopsis. In the present paper, we review this model and then discuss a number of issues related to the biological plausibility and implementation of this algorithm. Then, we present the main result of this paper: we have analyzed a number of experiments related to stereo fusion limits (Panum's area) and to disparity gradient and disparity scaling, and demonstrate that there is a simple unifying explanation for these phenomena in terms of a constant cortical module whose size is determined by a pair of ocular dominance columns. As a corollary, Panum's area must increase according to (inverse) cortical magnification factor. We show that this is supported by all existing experimental data.
一对皮质眼优势柱的大小决定了V1区的一个基本解剖模块，休伯尔和威塞尔将其称为超柱。这是否也对应一个基本的功能模块，或者是可通过心理物理学测量的模块呢？这是本文探讨的基本问题。由于眼优势柱结构被认为与立体视觉有关，所以很自然地会假设超柱大小应该为立体视觉的基本现象提供一个模块化基础。在之前的工作中，我们提出通过在由超柱大小缩放的皮质组织局部窗口上进行的倒谱变换进行局部非线性滤波，可提供这样一个立体视觉模块化模型。在本文中，我们回顾了这个模型，然后讨论了一些与该算法的生物学合理性和实现相关的问题。接着，我们给出本文的主要结果：我们分析了一些与立体融合极限（帕努姆区）以及视差梯度和视差缩放相关的实验，并证明对于这些现象存在一个简单统一的解释，即基于一个由一对眼优势柱确定大小的恒定皮质模块。作为一个推论，帕努姆区必须根据（反比）皮质放大因子增加。我们表明所有现有的实验数据都支持这一点。
