Recognizing the gist of a visual scene: possible perceptual and neural mechanisms

Abstract

We try to understand the basics of human image processing from a gist recognition perspective. Because the gist is only a subset of the image's information, we think that it is extracted with help of interpretation (feedback). In a perceptual section we list possible mechanisms that the interpretation process uses to determine the gist: in addition to the commonly known local-to-global perception evolvement, there is likely to be also a global-to-local evolvement direction, a coarse/fine scale, as well as a foreground/background scale. In a neural section we first summarize feedback connections that can possibly be involved in gist recognition. Second, we propose that the perceptual mechanisms are spread all over the cortex and that cortical visual computation occurs distributively rather than hierarchical.